Lost in Headspace

What's Next? Beats Me.

Fact: I have lost my ability to sequence.

I blame this, like many of my current existential challenges, on the pandemic. It’s gotten to a point that approaches slapstick. How, logically, do I get out of the house in the morning to do errands? Shoes on, jacket, but where’s my phone, and how did I let the battery get so low? Maybe I should eat something first. And what about feeding Charlie? There’s a load of clothes in the washing machine that aren’t going to shift to the dryer themselves, but man, do I have to pee! The next thing I know, forty-five minutes have passed and I’m still home, sitting in front of my computer screen, looking at houses for sale in Litchfield County. My pervasive inability to get things accomplished in a sensible manner, the way I used to when I trusted the world around me to operate predictably, would be extremely upsetting if I wasn’t so pathologically distractible.

I’m not sure what this signifies, but right now, I am just happy that I’ve retained the cause-and-effect sequence of elementary processes (though recently, I brushed my teeth before eating a tuna sandwich and later, attempted to drink from an unopened can of beer). It seems like ancient history, that halcyon time when I was capable of complex multi-tasking and prioritization, when I could ambulate from the car to the house without forgetting where I’d set down my phone or wallet or glasses. My undisciplined brain goes from sojourning to outright Swiss-cheesing. It is as if over the past two years, my cognition has meandered off, and now, it has gone irretrievably rogue.

It’s good to know I’m not alone in this daftness. I know precious few people who have maintained their edge, and I go out of my way to avoid them. Just looking into peoples’ eyes lets me know that we’re all, as a rule, undone. We go from A to F to even J, and occasionally slide off the alphabet altogether. We hope, collectively, for patience. Empathy. I am grateful for the small victories, like this collection of logically-sequenced paragraphs my errant brain allowed me to string together before remembering all the shit I was supposed to do before sitting down to write.