I realized when I woke several mornings at three-thirty that I had interrupted another me, from some faded mirror reality not quite mine, in the sense of this world, this dimension, this reality, but me just the same, another version of me, a shadow seen in the smoky mirror of extra-dimensional beingness.

This explained the strange head cold in the musty heat of August, the tennis elbow, though I’d not played tennis in decades, at least, not here.

Wednesday morning was the strangest. There were four small, sore, irritated reddish pink spots just up the arm from my right wrist. When I looked, still half sleeping, standing in my bathroom in the stark grey light of two power-saving bulbs, my first thought was poison ivy, but my second thought was more true, a snake bite. By four, thirty minutes after I returned, woke, to and in this version of reality, the red spots were gone, as was the itch.

The threads that had tied me from here to that unknown there were dissolving, falling away. I was back, here, fully me.

But some memories remained. And these words remained.