by Caitlin O’Halloran.
I once lost my hairbrush
and spent an entire evening looking for it.
My mother always said
I’d never get anywhere in life
if I couldn’t keep track of my things.
“You’re just like your father,” she’d tell me.
My father could never remember anyone’s name.
On the rare occasions when we were invited
to a neighbor’s cookout,
he’d say hello, excuse himself,
then later whisper to my mother
asking who it was.
After looking everywhere
I could think to look,
and in most places two or three times,
I gave up searching and resigned
to using my fingers to comb my hair.
But when I went to grab a jar of peanut butter
to pack tomorrow’s lunch,
I found it sitting there,
next to a can of brown sugar baked beans
and Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup.
I must have opened the pantry door
earlier that day, and somehow
in picking something up,
I put what I was holding down.
In this moment of forgetting,
this liminal space between
reaching and letting go,
my mind ran off somewhere,
leaving only my body,
a body guided by some universal law
where every action causes another.