A Ten Word Song

    Once again, I haven't been able to sleep. It's not that I'm not tired; I always feel tired these days even when I AM well rested, but whether that's just one of the many side effects of aging or my mind is simply asserting itself over my matter is difficult to discern.
I belong to a very strange and unusually small family; since we were all raised by the same matriarch, they're like brothers to me in addition to being a Father and an Uncle. The generational waveform is slightly collapsed around me, resulting in a feeling of being too old to accomplish anything and paradoxically too young to experience a sense of peace or restfulness.

Despite being wide awake for the last twenty-one hours, I just "came to" from some sort of waking dream about my Grandmother...

    Nin raised me alongside my father; since I've never been particularly close to the woman that gave birth to me, (she tries, I was so young when she left that I simply don't KNOW her well enough) so I had a Grandmother for a Mother figure. A formidable English teacher with multiple degrees, meaning I had head start in trying to make sense of the messy patchwork quilt that is the English language.
This poor woman was unceremoniously renamed by a toddler; the family lore asserts that I refused to call her by "Tatiana" or "Granny Tati" or anything reasonable, instead opting for "Ninny."
There's no way I had any idea what that meant; that it was short for nincompoop, but the amused and chagrined adult reactions to my insistence probably didn't help, so it stuck.

    Nin was standing in front of us thinking, counting in her head, and eventually cupping a hand to her ear.
"A Song" -we were playing charades.

She held both hands up, fingers and thumbs splayed threateningly, and waggled all her digits in defiant little ripples.

"TEN words!?" -someone else exclaimed. In an instant, I knew it could only be one song and quickly blurted out "I Am The Very Model Of A Modern Major General!"

She complained joyously, "oh no, how?! I had a whole plan, I was going to act out the drum majoring and vamp like a model!"

She's gone now, but that connection still exists somehow; I can sort of tell what she would think about most of the experiences I'm having, like an emulated instance-Nin that lives on in my head.

    I have no idea why my depped-out brain chose to surface this memory at the moment it did. I guess a game developer can't resist comparing the mechanics of recollection to the way computers work, because it feels as if the "firmware" of the conscious human mind, the forebrain if you will, is constantly being rewritten as we change and grow.
Tons of the deeper subconscious memories were neurochemically stored under earlier versions of that cognitive firmware, and the process of recalling them, of loading them into our current RAM configuration also changes them. Like the physics of trying to observe an obscure subatomic particle, the only way to locate or prove a memory exists is by affecting it; every time we load up a "scene," that translation into our current self's "file format" changes the data a little bit.
Darkly, this is likely how external manipulation and gaslighting mechanically function, and how unresolved conflicts or trauma can grow into phobias and erode the health of the entire system. But these are also the mechanics that make nostalgia possible, that sand the edges of hardship off parts of our lives, letting us watch another sunrise through the smooth, pitted glass of treasured recollections.

It's how we steal moments like that one second long round of charades back from the clutches of life; the raw difficulty of existing and outliving those we love.