Consciously Asleep

I was reading an ARC—Loving Mr. Impossible by Anastasia Alexander—when it hit me.

Not the story itself, but something it stirred loose.

A memory. The kind that doesn’t knock first. Just a flash of an image that rolls into a movie picture.

My great-aunt Genevieve’s house. Her living room. Plastic on the furniture. You’d hear a faint squeak when you sat down. If you wore shorts, you’d have to be careful to not lose a layer of skin when rising. Then there was the plastic runner stretched across the carpet, and if you lifted it just right, it left those little spike marks like tiny daggers in the rug.

She always had a bowl of hard candy on the end table—unwrapped, sticking together in one stubborn mass. Everyone’s hands in it. Cousins, fingers not exactly clean. You’d still break off a piece, jagged and sharp, and eat it anyway. No hesitation. No second thought.

It’s strange, the things that come back.

Tia Genevieve and her children lived on food stamps for a long time. So when they could finally afford nice things, those things became sacred. Untouchable. Dolls stayed in their boxes. Furniture stayed covered. Upstairs wasn’t really for living—it was for proving something. We made it.

Life happened in the basement. The in-law apartment. That’s where it felt real.

And the smell—Aqua Net hanging in the air like a cloud. Every woman in my family believed it took half a can to tame a few flyaways. (Sorry, ozone layer.) My mom and her cousins at the table, playing cards, cigarette after cigarette, the house closed tight around them. No thought for the air the children were breathing.

The kids sat around the old box TV. We watched whatever we could get on those four television stations. Maybe a fifth if you turned the knob just right—hovering in that in-between space before the click, where the picture almost came in clear.

That’s what gets me. Not the big moments. Not the milestones.

This.

The way memory waits—quiet, patient—until something small cracks it open. A sentence in a book. A smell. A texture.

And suddenly you’re there again.

Not remembering.

Reliving.

Consciously asleep.

The mind is a strange and beautiful thing.