I’ve learned two ways to look at each thing. In this manner I navigate from one breath to another. Sometimes things seem hopeless, and as though there’s nothing I can do. I use the two ways to make the situation turn around. I learned the two ways from some programme on daytime television, whichever programme it was is lost in a purée of memories of listless afternoons.

            I saw it when I was home sick from school, sick or playing sick, in an empty afternoon that whorled vortex-like around me. I felt the want of inspiration and motivation. I was numbly aware of the worthless nature of myself. I had a restless urge of needing to do something, tempered with being in a funk and an inability to move further than the space between the couch and the kitchen. I went to the kitchen to get more chips or cookies. In afternoons like that I’d pick one or the other depending on which I though would be least missed. I’d push up the remaining cookies in the packet so that it’d seem that one wasn’t missing. I’d take half of a third of the remaining chips in an open packet. These strategies I’m sure fooled no-one. I doubt whether anyone cared if I ate a packet of knock-off Oreo-a-like cookies, doping myself into a carb stupor. The only person my incremental pilfering had an effect on was me.

It was after a brain-fugging binge on chocolate flavoured cookies that I received the wisdom about the two ways. I was lying on my back on the leatherette couch. Head hanging backwards over the edge so that blood could pour into and gather in my skull, and so that my eyes had to auto-adjust what they were seeing enabling me to view it the right way up. I wasn’t doing anything that I thought would be a good way to pass this deadening time. I listed mentally what I should be or could be doing instead of this maltose trip. Wash my hair, post those letters, make something healthy for lunch, laundry, write to Aña, finish my biology homework, read up to page 152 of Huckleberry Finn, get dressed. Every item seemed hum drum to the point of obsolescence. All of them decadent, pointless and vague metaphors about how utterly vapid my life really was. In this state of de-motivation and of flirting on the edge of unhappiness I reclined, idly waiting until I could no longer bear the rush of blood to my upside down head, looking at the television.

A young-ish, smart-looking man wearing a fedora and a crisp pressed suit walked from screen left to sharp focus at screen right. The programme was shot in monotonous monochrome. The man looked out of the television at me. He said, “Baby, there’s only two ways to look at something. Either you feel it’s right in your heart, or you feel it’s right in your head. There ain’t no middle ground.”

I began to think about asking, so what if you don’t feel it’s right in your heart or in your head?

I kid you not. That man on screen, filmed decades in the past, heard my thoughts somehow. He said, “Well baby.” He took off his fedora to reveal greased, straight, slick, dark hair, side parted. “Baby, that’s when you cut and run. If something’s that wrong you don’t want to go near it.”

Maybe it sounds dramatic if I say that this was some kind of turning point for me. But I’m saying that’s just what it was. I’ve re-run that memory – me paralysed by inaction and brain-fugged on cookies, lying there on the couch and a man in the television talking to me. I’ve tried to spot the seams in the memory where I’ve grafted what I think happened over what did happen, but I can’t spot them. They’re not there. Someone in the television, or someone using the television as some kind of cosmic funnel, spoke to me. It was the equivalent of a spiritual claxon: get the fuck up and move.

I mean, I didn’t move right away. I stayed put for a while longer, chewing the cud of my own laziness. Watching the television more closely. There was not even a flicker of acknowledgement of my renewed attention from the screen. I tried to catch my guy’s eye and he was having none of it. He was a master of shaking off unwanted attention. I felt like a shoddy paparazzi chasing a born and bred a-lister.

What the guy said to me trundled on in my brain. I can feel when something’s right in my head or I can feel it in my heart. It made me feel kind of special that I, of all louche teenagers wasting what we were told was the gift of youth, was chosen somehow to receive this tip. I tried to apply it to my life, how I’ve been living my life. It’s not always worked out, I’m not always able to walk away when I should, or to intervene when I ought to, or even to ask for something I know with all my heart that I need.

There was one winter when the frosts came hard and just to go outside would make your eyelashes acquire a coating of ice crystals. Your breath could freeze in your lungs. A night in that winter I was driving home from college and I saw a person shuffling along the side of the road. A bum. Bags taped to his or her feet. Looked like two or three raggedy coats on all at once and all poking through each other’s holes. I knew with my heart it would be the right thing to stop, ask that person into my car and give them something hot to eat or drink. To offer to drive them to the nearest shelter, pay for their bed that night. But I didn’t. My foot stepped on the gas pedal and I drove fast past the guy. I’d like to say that I don’t know what influence it was made me ignore my fellow human in need. It was me, rebelling against my heart with all the fear my head could string together on short notice. What ifs are my heart’s biggest naysayers. Seems like for every small victory my heart wins, my head’s ahead in the long game. I hold out hope that my head and heart will draw even eventually.

Take this situation. I can’t tell how many jobs my head’s somehow got me into that my heart’s made me walk out on. How many doors of potential careers I’ve slammed in my own face down to my heart saying, no – that’s a plain wrong set-up. It’s my heart has led me here, serving food, sometimes cooking it, wiping tables and telling strangers my story if they show an interest. It might not seem like much.

I tell strangers about the two ways of looking at life. They might choose to forget it right away or it might stay with them. Once I give my story out to someone it’s theirs, I don’t have any call to dictate to them how to take it. Now and then one of my listeners might thank me for telling them. They might say, “That’s just what I needed.” They might look at me like I’m nuts.

I don’t know what sort you are, but you have the story now. It’s yours. Do with it what you want.