What You Carry Home

It follows you out. Of course it does. You were not expecting it to and that is only because nobody explained.

Something ends and you stand up and put the world back on, and for an hour you are fine, and then on Tuesday you are standing in a queue somewhere unremarkable and a sentence comes back to you with the full weight it had at the time, and it is entirely out of place, and you have no idea what to do with your face. That is not a malfunction. Everyone thinks it is a malfunction. It is the actual product, arriving late.

What you carry is not memory in the ordinary sense. Memory is a thing you retrieve. You go and get it, deliberately, and it comes when called and it is somewhat faded. This is not like that. This comes for you. You did not summon it and you cannot dismiss it, and it has lost none of its temperature in the interval, and it turns up in the middle of something else with all the authority it had in the room. That is a different mechanism entirely and it belongs to the same family as scent and dreams rather than to recollection.

Men worry about this. They ask, in various oblique ways, whether it is a problem that the thing does not stay where they put it. They have a compartment for it, carefully built, and it will not stay in the compartment, and they take that as evidence of some failure of discipline. It is the reverse. Anything that stayed in the compartment did nothing. Compartmentalised experience is inert by definition. It is sealed off precisely so that it cannot touch anything, and a thing that touches nothing changes nothing, and you would have wasted your evening.

The leak is the work. What comes back on Tuesday is not the session. It is you, in a queue, briefly recognising that you are the same man who was in that room, and that both versions are real, and that the version you perform in the queue is not more true than the other one merely because more people are watching it. That recognition is the whole of it. It is not comfortable and it is not supposed to be.

Notice which parts come back. It is never what you expect. It is almost never the intense part, the part you would describe if you had to describe it. It is a small thing, a half sentence, something I said in passing without weight, and it has hooked into you somewhere and it will not come out. That is because the intense part was the part you were braced for and braced things do not lodge. The thing that lodged went in while you were unguarded, which is why you cannot remember it being important.

So let it come. Do not manage it. The instinct to shove it back into the box is the same instinct that has kept everything at a distance for twenty years, and it will work here too, and you will have paid for something and then declined to receive it.

You are meant to be slightly haunted. That is not a figure of speech and it is not romantic. It means the thing is still running, doing what it does, in the parts of you that do not answer to your schedule. It will surface when it surfaces. Let it find you in the queue.