Memory

I had a late lunch with Memory, yesterday. I know that seems too strange to be true, but I insist that it is.

I'm still in the pattern of eating only two meals a day, most probably because of jetlag (although I feel that less, now) and my body's still generally discombobulated sense of meal times and when they ought to be. Generally, twenty past four pm seems like meal time for me, but yesterday I might have ventured forth a little earlier.

So, I returned to the restaurant (and the table) where all of us has been sitting, the day before, when I'd had to leave early in pursuit of relative (family) matters.

And suddenly: There is Memory.

"Today -- you do not look tired!" -- he pronounced with deftness. It was untrue. I was still tired, but no longer stressed.

He had come into the pub to reflect upon the conference presentation. So I bought him a meal and something to drink with some of my funny-money, some of this strange monopoly stuff that is actually worth more than it seems.

It was pleasant enough to have company. I reflected obsessively about my tiredness, which is something I had been doing more or less ever since I had arrived in the UK. My concern for my health has been a preoccupation ever since I came tenuously close to losing it to chronic fatigue syndrome (during the long periods of maladaptation to the new cultural environment).

In all sorts of ways that I care not to mention, this trip has involved facing various aspects of that trauma and the initiatory factors that bought it on. I don't yet consider myself to have fully recovered.

And Memory and I talked, and I had another pint of beer (which, I suspect made him feel more and more that I was not like the ordinary Zimbabwean women he had been used to.) And I remembered that fatigue, in my father's eyes, was always a sign or characterological weakness, that had to be punished within an inch of its life in order to bring it up to scratch and obedient again to convention.

And we talked of skydiving and I said how easy it in fact is, compared to a lot of things that we take to be easy.

And a couple of hours later, Memory recalled an appointment that he'd missed by several minutes, and he had to rush to meet it.