I have only hallucinated once. In my twenties. They wrote a song about that time of a person's life called, "Those Were the Days." And, boy oh boy, were they. I write about a lot of crazy experiences in my unpublished memoir. I was a wild child. Wild.
Did you notice how I pivoted away from the whole hallucinating thing? But this isn't going to be about my hallucinations back in the day. It's about now and Bob's visual excitements.
My memoir deals mainly with dementia with flights of fancy into the past, present, and future. The excerpt below, is written in third person but I've chosen to write the memoir in both first person and third person. The scene is a real-life scene that rewinds throughout the day and from day to day.
WHERE WE START
1
I heard a really good time travel joke tomorrow.
He holds onto something precious, something invisible pinched between his thumb and index finger.
“What’s in those pinky fingers?” she asks.
He giggles.
She cups her hand under his.
“Give it to me. I’ll keep it for you.”
He drops the invisible artifact into her palm. She places it into the pocket of her gray sweatshirt.
His crumbling mind sees things she never will.
Like I said above, every day and every time we walk from bed to bathroom, I ask him to give me whatever it is he holds in his fist and, every day Bob hands me something--something I can't see. He opens his fingers a smidge and flicks them together as if brushing sand off the ends of his fingertips. Then, he drops whatever it is into my open palm. I put it into a pocket and tell him I'll keep it for him. It seems he has an endless supply of invisible cherishables. I wish I knew what they were. I wish he could tell me what I was keeping in my pockets for him all these many days. What if they're invisible spiders or hornets?
Hebrews 11:1 "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."
BY FAITH WE UNDERSTAND
I fear I may never know what we're exchanging but I know it's something precious to us. Him giving me unimaginable treasures and me accepting them. I have faith he sees them. It's only from my limited perspective that I cannot.
This exchange we make has been an ongoing process for several months, since I've noticed he started to exhibit contracture.
Still, it makes me wonder what else he sees. I was telling him about visions and angels, spirits and the promise of this next life we're closing in on. He understood what I was saying. Hope exuded from his eyes. I told him about a man (one of my family) who had car trouble on a very busy intersection. He had to push his car to get it out of traffic and when he started to push it out of the intersection, another man came up to him and helped him push it to a gas station on the other the side of the road. When this man turned to say, "Thank you," he was gone. Poof. Like he'd only imagined it but he hadn't imagined it. A man helped him push his car right beside him for about 100 feet. What an angel, right?
I believe in one God, the Father Almighty creator of heaven and earth and of all that is seen and unseen... ~The Nicene Creed
There's so much mystery in our world it's ever so difficult to be flippant about what's really happening. Like I know more than the next person or that they know more than I do.
All I have is my faith. I believe in God. I also believe Bob is giving me something that actually exists. In his mind? Sure. And what if it doesn't exist at all? So what. We are giving and taking from each other. Back and forth. Him to me. Me to him. That's the real gift.
God bless you all.