Where is G on Mendeleev’s Table?

Your waking mind can be such a deceiving, insidious monster. It can fool you into believing things about the seductive simplicity of its own power. Things as stupid, clichéd and untrue as 2 plus 2 equals 4.

Things like putting memories, and thoughts and people out of your mind.

But it never is as simple as saying I’m not going to let my mind dwell on this memory. Or that one. Or any one of those that made up a year and some, na?

After all, how much is one year of your life, really? Give or take some?

Nothing much, your mind will tell you. It will goad you into believing that you’re being a weak fool to be so stuck. Until, of course, the day that you discover with horror, the truth behind your inability.

The terrifying, overwhelming, colossal truth.

A truth that you could’ve only discovered by waking up in the middle of a dream, quite by chance.

A dream so inconsequential, that its essence is the boring detail that makes up the necessary but perennially unnoticeable continuum of each waking day.

Was the window of the car rolled up three quarters or three fifths?
Did the grey corduroy of the car seat look slightly greyer under the shadow of four sets of bums?
Were you secretly pushing and expanding your muscles in the back seat trying to greedily but subtly hog more space as you were squeezed in with three other people?

And if you realise that even at the heart of a numbingly boring dream, in the midst of noticing the grey of the car seat, the rolled-up-ness of the window, and the secret measuring of how much space you’re making by flexing your butt muscles, there is a deep dull sense of only one thing -- the one thing that you’re trying to escape in your waking moments; the one thing you’ve told yourself should be easy to get past if you just ignore the urge to dwell on it; then what?

I’ll tell you.

Then, suddenly it dawns on you that this dull ache, this consciousness of a singular thing is what makes up the fabric of your thought. It is the thoughtron that you will arrive at if you were to continuously divide your thoughts by themselves, down, down, down well into infinity, to finally arrive at the inner universe of singleness. Indestructible. Indivisible. Building block of your presently thinking self.

And with the deepest sense of terror, you realise that the essence of those thoughtrons is the letter G.

Like a Warhol poster of Campbell Soup cans spawning endlessly, it is the pixel of your consciousness. The letter G. The image G. Grey and Green. Buddha and Gold.

Then it makes sense. The sudden, breathless sightings where there could have been none, like the one at South Extension market, in a blue Benetton t-shirt, pausing a moment, hands cupped, head bent, to light a smoke.

***
Last night, I saw a baldpate. I couldn’t believe it. Luxurious golden locks reduced to a straggly rim already?! Wasn’t this supposed to happen in our forties, a decade and a half into togetherness? But I happened to notice it at a despondent moment in the course of one iffy night. Yet again.

Why must you be so unsure, even in my dreams? And why must I continue to dream?