Inside my head

No, I don't have the sensation of actual bugs running around inside my head, but in a way they might as well be. They are little bugs of memory from all those books I read in my past, and which, unbidden, appear in my mind when it's not involved with actual thought. I think it might be a coping mechanism to keep thoughts of reality away: I'm not sure. One memory from long ago reading is from one of Thomas Wolfe's home-titled books, either "Look Homeward Angel" or "You can't Go Home Again." I'm not certain which, and I'm pretty sure I'll never look it up, so I'm operating from distant recall. One of the characters, from a first-person viewpoint, narrates how he witnessed a man jump from a multi-story building. I think the person who saw the fall was a policeman or fireman because he ran to the scene where the jumper lay on the sidewalk, mortally injured but still alive. The dying man desperately tells the narrator that as soon as he jumped, he wished he hadn't, that it was only a few seconds ago, and he wants to go back those few seconds to before he jumped. He asked the witness to tell his mother he didn't mean to do it. I recall it as a very powerful passage about regret and the inability to take back what we've done. When I started teaching, at age 22, I used to read this passage to my class to illustrate some moral or literary technique: I taught then English 7, 8, and 9, so I'm hoping I read it to the older kids. Back then, suicide was a pretty dramatic subject, and I was probably too young to consider its impact. But I don't think any of those student ever committed suicide either.