Man Falls From the Sky, then Disappears

Sometimes when I have trouble sleeping I close my eyes and imagine a bright yellow sun in the middle of wherever that is when you close your eyes and there is darkness. Go ahead--try it. Now open your eyes and read the rest of this post. Sometimes that yellow sun is darting all over that space behind my eyes, to the right then the left, up in the corner, movingmovingmoving with racing thoughts of what if and why and then what. Center the sun, I think to myself, and push it back to the middle. Bills and jobs and broken things. Center the sun.

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Several people claim they saw a person falling from the sky with no parachute. “You could see the arms and legs flailing and his clothes were blue, a dark blue like a navy, black and gray,” one witness said. “There’s no doubt that it was a person. We’re 100 percent sure.” An extensive search has turned up no evidence. (This is the type of news that keeps me awake at night.)

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Our brains are not like computers at all, but more of an overgrown garden. So says neuro-scientist Gerald Edelman, and I am prone to believing scientists. He says that how you live affects your brain, that your brain is not an algorithm at all but constantly growing, organic, throwing off seeds and regenerating like weeds. For instance taxi drivers. Taxi drivers given brain scans by scientists at University College London had a larger hippocampus compared with other people. This is the part of the brain associated with navigation in birds and animals. The scientists also found part of the hippocampus grew larger as the taxi drivers spent more time in the job. So what does this mean to my mind and my body, to the night I spent watching Dancing with the Stars and how the woman at my Starbucks has never ever gotten my name right, not even once? (Sometimes when I am driving I enter a fugue state and have to really think about how to get where I am going. If I take this exit, then...? When I remember it's funny to me, that brief moment wherein I disappeared.)

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Zoey freaks out when I do not give her strawberry milk. Which I understand because strawberry milk is good, and it is pink. Still, she whines, and then cries, hiccups, yells. Zoey, I say, take a deep breathe. Inhale, now hold it. Now exhale, through your mouth, let me hear it...HHHHAAAHHHHHH. Because if there is one thing I want to teach my daughter it is how to breathe.

Art found here.