Chanel No. 5

The Time-Life fountains dissolve into snowflakes. I enter a revolving door at 23 and come out at 56. (This happened a few years back.)

It was 6:30 on a winter evening in the 80s, say, then 8:30 on a sweet spring morning in the 90s, which meant I was in my 40s or 50s, then it was third grade with Miss Miller, who had dark hair and blue eyes.

Then ninth grade with Mrs. Rossberg and JFK has just been shot, then my kind and smart client, John Kennedy, Jr., dies in a plane crash while we are working on a project he had planned for 20 years.

We were taught there were three dimensions—height, width and depth—like a shoebox. But there are four when you count time. Plus dimensions of mind.

New York comes back to me in flashes, like everything else. Chanel No. 5, my mom, my mom wearing pearls, the lights that alternate spelling “Time” and “Life” above Rockefeller Plaza.

Walking home, mauve sky, June, among people in event-ing clothes. I mean evening clothes.

Everything connects: your child, your mom, the music you hear, the books you’ve read, the poems, the theater, the art, the travels, every image in your life, every conversation, everything you learned, knew, did. You have to make the book “handicapped accessible.” Rather, I have to make it handicapped accessible so I can write it.

Oh, I didn’t mention the book. I also left out the Imaginary Therapist, whom I call the I.T.

She said she heard I am writing a book.

I said, Yes.

She asked me to say more.

I said, At first, I wrote by hand. Or really by “wrist.” Brief like fortune cookies. My right hand was in a brace. I used my left hand to stick a pen in the brace.

The I.T. leaned in and asked what the book would be about.

I said, It would be a variation on romantic comedies, where two humans begin as combatants and wind up in each other’s arms. Except, in this case, they’d wind up with each other’s arms. We’re the same person — pre- and post-truck.

I added, They say the first year of marriage is the most difficult. You’re learning to live with a new person, as in what works and what doesn’t. Surviving brain damage is sort of like that, except the new person you live with is you.