“Well actually I thought about you, period. In the field but also when I was home. Before a mission, after a mission - Elsa P. Sometimes I thought of you during a mission, just to stay alive. In fact, I actually credit you for keeping me alive on several occasions and you weren’t even there.”

“Like how. What do you mean?”

“Well like one time I was on patrol… you aren’t going to believe this, but it was forty degrees below zero. Forty below! And I had to be out in that. I had to be outside patrolling. We were… it was the (omitted) border, and no shit. It was cold! It was so cold but we had to do this and we did do it. We patrolled that border. As if some motherfucker was gonna come out in that kind of weather and try to do something.”

I laughed.

“I had no idea what we were doing but we did do it. You know. We didn’t stay inside and say we did it. Cold as it was, we actually patrolled that thing and we did it in shifts. And we were dressed for this kind for the temperature. We had proper clothing, it was as good as you could get, but it was still almost unbearable.”

“Yeah. Sounds like hell.”

“Hell, yes, except this was a cold hell. So anyway, you think you’re going to die when it’s that cold. You think you’re going to die right then and there, turn into a Popsicle. I could almost feel myself freezing to death so you know what I did?”

“What?”

“Well I was hoping to stay alive out there, so I just started thinking of us on the bike. You know. We used to go ride sometimes. We’d go out that highway towards Nogales. We’d head to Mexico.”

“I remember.”

“Yeah, well those were… I loved that. And do you remember how warm it was?”

“It was hot. It was 100 degrees,” I said. “Hotter, even.”

“Right. The heat would come off the pavement and the bike… it would be hot too. Remember this, P? You know how the bike would get hot and you could feel it against your shins?”

“I do. I have pictures.”

“You have pictures of that? Of that highway, you mean?”

“Yeah. That highway, exactly.” I laughed because the universe is so weird.

“What the? Where did you get all these pictures, E?”

“I don’t know. I took them. And I kept them. And I definitely have a picture of that highway, but it’s not of us. Um, we went for a ride. Me and you on one bike and two of your friends on another.”

“GI friends?”

“Yeah. And I snapped their pic from the back of the bike. You know. I was riding behind you and dug my camera out and fired. I snapped their pic while we were all going 70 mph or whatever. So it’s not a picture of us, it’s a picture of them, on the bike and in motion.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember their names. You know I never paid any attention to any of your friends. I had no interest in them. I didn’t need to be flirting with your friends and I didn’t really like GI’s anyway. To tell you the truth they scared me!”

“You’re scared of GI’s?”

“Yeah. Of their uniforms at least. The uniforms made me nervous so I pretty much ignored all GI’s across the board.”

“Except me.”

“Right. But you were you. One of them was a tallish kind of skinny Italian guy and I don’t remember the other at all.”

He guessed who I was talking about and I remembered the name, instantly.

“Yeah, that’s him. I’ll send it to you.”

“Okay. I’d like to see it, but anyway P, I was out in the cold on the border there and all you want to do is be warm. Even just a little bit. One degree. Just one degree warmer would help.”

“I bet.”

“Yeah. So I was out there and I started thinking about riding down that highway and how hot it was.”

“Hot!”

“Yeah. And it warmed me up. Do you understand? All I had to do was think of this and I found I could stand it. I could stand the cold. I think it actually raised my body temperature.”

“That’s pretty cool.”

“Yeah, well it worked. And that that might have been a little delusional too. I’ll never know. But I can tell you that it helped me survive that. Just thinking about that sun and those good times.”

Do you use techniques like this? Can you change your reality with your imagination?

skip to “Do Accidents Happen?”