Silence? Really?
So it didn’t happen in that way.
So it did happen, just not as you recall. I can’t help that. I can’t help that your memory is tainted.
I can’t help that your memory is tainted.
By her.
By her.
You speak to wound, sir.
It is her memory? Then it is still tainted. By her. That is out of my control. I cannot help that she remembers it that way.
I remember it in my own way.
Yes, it is painful. Such memories usually are. It is their nature. It is why couples separate, why families crumble, why I am here on this rock tens of millions of miles from home, arguing with you about it. And what stuns me is that though you never met her, you take her side.
The side of righteousness, you say?
I didn’t listen to her. I do not have to listen to you. You with the grey skin and the pockmarked face and that pole stuck up your rear end. If I turned you twenty degrees to the right – twenty degrees – you would never feel the sun on your face again.
I would like that memory.
I do not know his.
I do not know his thoughts. How can I know his thoughts, I am not him? I am not inside my head.
He remembers it. He remembers it her way. He remembers it her way. He remembers it.
Freudian slip, yes. I am not inside his head, as you are inside mine. And I know she planted you there to grow like a marigold. Evil, she was, to plant marigolds in my mind. Dandelions I could uproot. Crabgrass I could kill. But marigolds. Marigolds. They grow in the full light of the sun and do not shirk from the heat if they are properly watered. And oh, she waters these marigolds every day. They spill their seeds after the flowers ripen and fade and more marigolds grow, in the profusion I remember in the back garden as a child, marigolds growing up among the gravel by the spigot, spilling out of the flowerbeds below the brown painted beams of the windows.
That they grow here, so far from the sun, where there is only dust and ice, is a cruelty. It is why all hermits fail. They bring with them that which they flee.
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