Cup XXV: Swimming in a Pool of Memory, Walking the Floors of a Stranger's House

Tea: Arctic Storm, ginger and Sichuan peppercorn added

Music: Poe, "Haunted," on the player; Piano piece from "House With Pool," looping in my head

Time: (now) Night; (then) Several days in 2005

Occasionally, most often around the shift from summer into fall, I get a bit disconnected from present time and place. Not to where I can't function, mind you. It's more of a foggy, half-dreamy ab/distraction.

Today, the weather turned cooler -- and that, coupled with my slight addledness from my allergies and the medications I'm taking for them, created the ideal conditions for such a state.

The disconnects always come accompanied by music, vivid in my mind's ear. Tonight, it's the piano piece from "House With Pool," the looped video piece by Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler that played two years ago at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.

I would sit in the broken dark, watching the film repeat seamlessly for hours. The piano piece appeared (sounded?) twice -- once abortively, once through to a climax auditory, visual and emotional. And each time, it was both new and familiar -- never got old, never seemed that I hadn't heard it before.

But as far as I know, there's no soundtrack to purchase. I'll never own this music. Instead, it owns me, in a way. I can't hear it, even internally, without feeling a pull -- tenuous and steel-strong as spider's silk -- to ... what? The past? Some memory I don't know I have? Something ahead, still?

Maybe it's all interconnected. Maybe it's just a matter of breathing and letting the memories/impulses tug me along to where I'm supposed to be at the moment.

Or maybe it's just the decongestant ...

Tonight's haunting story:

Elia W. Peattie, "The Piano Next Door"