MY GRANDMOTHER bought me a French press for my birthday, in early October of 2022. To inaugurate my new toy, I went to buy some coffee beans and settled on a local seasonal variety, the Roasterie's “Autumn Harvest.” The coffee was good, and for a few weeks I made a cup of it every morning at five, when I got up to read and write before my run. During that time I had rediscovered the Spoon song “I Summon You,” and I listened to it while jogging down the sidewalks of the busy nearby boulevard, where orange and yellow leaves were piled before flagstone homes. I'd been out of prison less than three months, and I was sleeping on an air mattress in my mother's living room. Two kittens woke me up each morning around four.
THE NORMAL way of remembering things is disrupted by prison sentences longer than one year. Uncannily synchronized, the regular cycles of nature and society cause us to see and smell and taste the same things each year, assuming we occupy roughly the same location. This shouldn't be (conscious) news to you, but it was news to me, after stepping outside of the normal conception of time for sixty-four months. And because of this peculiar annual action of memory, it wasn't news to me until I'd been out of prison for one whole year. Like all functions of memory, it was delayed.
The first inkling came in the form of the physical bag of coffee beans on the grocery store shelf: orange with silver trim, cartoon acorns and leaves, the company's trademark propellered aircraft. Around this time two years ago, I was looking for beans to break in my new French press. Last fall I was in the same store, looking for beans again, but a little less fascinated by the abundance of