Like Riding a Bicycle

Sometimes - in those few, fleeting seconds of awakeness that occur between climbing into bed and utterly conking out for the night - sometimes, at those sorts of times, you gaze blearily at your loved one, who is usually already asleep and possibly drooling slightly at this point, and you find yourself thinking, "I don't think I remember how to kiss."

And this thought, surprisingly, doesn't keep you up at night. Not much can when you're as tired as you are these days. But it does come back to haunt you the next day as you're riding the train to work in the morning, and you carefully turn the thought over in your mind and examine it from all angles and think, "Yep. It's been so long that I am reasonably sure I can't remember."

And because you are chronically sleep-deprived and the train is rocking you lovingly to sleep at this point, the next thoughts that follow in a very natural and drowsy fashion are, "I should practice more... when do I have time to practice?... it will have to be at work... maybe I could even bill some time for it... I love creative billing... this woman is wearing too much perfume for seven a.m..." and so forth.

And by the time you arrive at work, you realize you have just mentally committed yourself to some extramarital activities that may or may not receive spousal support on submission for approval, but you still haven't had any coffee yet today so a defense of your proposal begins to develop an amorphous, sports-analogy-type shape in your head: "It's like rollerblading, dear. Hockey doesn't mind rollerblading during the off-season because ultimately you are working towards better hockey when hockey is unavailable because it is too tired from two kids-job-laundry-gardening-cooking supper-housework to play hockey, so you go rollerblading instead. Just so, in eighteen years or so when the possibility of hockey arises again, you can remember how to get around on the ice."

Fortunately, there is plenty of caffeine available at work and soon your mental function returns, and you realize that anyways, your workplace has far too many windows and not enough supply closets, and to hell with catching up on laundry tonight, you will just have to give re-learning how to kiss the old college try at home instead.

The neural pathways already exist. How hard can it be?