Continuity

Jaimee and I don't host parties often, but we once had an after-reading party in Greensboro back in 2003 or 2004. The food was good, the conversation was good, a lot of good people came, and I daresay a good time was had by all. Maybe the best time was had by a friend of ours named Detlef, who spent much of the night scribbling cryptic notes on Post-its and stashing them around the house. I found a few the next morning, one in the freezer, another in the shower.

"I hid them everywhere. You'll be finding these things for the rest of your life," he told me.

We found a few more over the coming months, about ten or so, and after that things were pretty quiet. Every so often I'd be surprised: one inside the toilet tank, another at the bottom of a drawer or inside rarely used tupperware. When we moved, I found a few final stragglers in the furniture, including one inside the couch and another underneath a bookshelf.

None in the year and a half since, until today, when I randomly had occasion to pull my copy of A Brief History of Time off the bookshelf for the first time in years. The book flipped open to a random page.



That was flashback enough. Then I saw the inscription on the inside front cover. I'd totally forgotten where I'd gotten the book in the first place: ten years ago, on my 18th birthday, from a girl with whom (let's be charitable) Things Did Not Work Out. In her note she'd written a number of bold predictions about the importance and permanence of our friendship, predictions which not only pretty spectacularly failed to come to pass but which (given my memory of November 1998) may actually have been proven wrong within the next ten minutes.

So it's been a funny kind of morning.