What if, every night, your sleeping soul is carried by the white spider from the previous day’s body to the next day’s body, so that, as every morning, you wake to a new life, with a new set of memories that, feeling genuine make the new life feel like the same old life as always, a life you remember? Because of the memories. And you go through the day carrying the burden of those memories, bent under grudges, horrors and hopes, hurting others, hurting yourself, trying to help and getting it wrong, thinking, This is the day I have some luck, until you fall asleep again at night, and wake in a new same old bed the next morning.

With a new face that feels like an old face, with scars the infliction of which you remember in detail, remember well, or vaguely, or only through stories, with bills to pay, kids to get off to school, animals to feed, a yard to mow, doctors’ appointments, laws of nature to obey.

Until one morning you look out that day’s window into the windows of a hundred thousand other apartments and wonder, who am I without these memories, which are maybe not real? These memories are only the stories I am telling myself today. What if I tell myself other stories?

What if I say, to hell with the memories, if only for today?

What’s on the menu?