Why does no one think to ask the important questions? I can’t understand. What about, What does the smell of an orange remind you of? Or they could have tried, Who was the last person who touched you? Who was the last person you touched? Who taught you to cut a chain of snowflakes from a single sheet of paper? If you had a boxwood hedge would you carve it into straight lines or would you let it grow wild. Do you believe the last three things you were told. Do you think there’s an art to opening locked doors. Do you believe in opening locked doors at all. Are we talking French doors or pocket doors or hinged doors or barn doors? What are the colours of the doors in your dreams. The doors you open and the doors that stay locked, how do you know the difference before you touch them. Ask me that, I could say, then maybe we could find something to talk about.

If we love someone enough they’ll come back to us only better. We only have to believe things enough to make them true.

You’re the only one who comes back you know. The universe is flying apart slowly and will never come back together, never ever again. The centres drop out of things all the time and we lose our favourite things and never find them. We’re farther away today than we ever were before from everything else. But when you leave, I can say see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow. See? I can say see you tomorrow every day.

If I were to speak specifically though, if I were to let, say, the words fall like spiders out of my mouth, if I were to tell you something really terrible, would you come back? Would we still pretend to eat chocolates? Would you stand there next to me almost touching me, the way you do when you wipe out my little sink? Would you still? If I were to pull the terrible thing inch by inch, like a long blind eel, shrieking, out of my throat?

Everyone knows what they want me to say, everyone is waiting for me to say it. Don’t think I don’t know that. Don’t think I don’t understand that! Don’t think I don’t see it, them all standing around me with their bald featherless old vulture heads, waiting to dip their miserable beaks in underneath my ribs where I am raw and red and bloated.

What I’m trying to tell you is there’s only screaming all the way down my throat, and the thing they’re waiting for, it’s only noise, it’s only sound, it’s all there and I’m already saying it and I’m always saying it and it’s nothing, it’s nothing but noise.

Part Three

15

The apartment was quiet after M left, but it wasn’t an easy kind of quiet, more like the waiting and watching kind. The hitch that comes at the end of a long deep drawn-in breath. I wanted to go to the park. I wanted to spread out our picnic blanket and lie down on top of it and sleep until M was back and would be back in the apartment with us. I wanted to sleep until I wasn’t alone, however long that took.