After midnight she’d answer in bed.
Are you awake?
Almost.
I am under the covers.
And it is cold.
You cannot get warm enough under different covers.
If you are freezing, one way of making it less cold
is getting under the same cover.
I was talking about making a choice.
I know. We are under the same cover, anyway.
I bet you can hear me right behind you.
[GIGGLES.]
Can you turn around, please.
[.......................]
Feels real, doesn’t it?
After a quick visit. Kat came to Melbourne to meet her school-friend; the telephone book asked my brother,if; who, asked me, whether? She’d agreed she will call at my flat on the way to the airport. We will have, maybe, an hour. —Yes, now, I remember the night we never had. Although it is true, we had only written, met once during an airport transit. We’d corresponded since sixteen. Actually, we’d stopped writing when she suddenly turned up.
Very little happened. Kat almost left in the same taxi she arrived in, for the airport. I see a fusing of images on the screen. Kat comes out of the taxi, carrying her suitcase, looking forward, happily, breezily. The image fusing with the other one of Kat, I, carrying the suitcase. Two ghostly Kats, come out/ enter, the taxi; two ghosts of me (at the flat/ behind the taxi) wave hello/good-bye: thus the two images fuse, as I am left moving to the flats. No Simon & Garfunkle, Bach-inspired, canticle, as was for their, now grandfathers, interlude.
We are in the flat. I am drinking. Obviously, this narrates the tale in-between the two fusing scenes, just now, with the taxi.
We are still; we are laughing. I keep pointing to a bottle: she, shaking her head; she, shaking her finger at me. Close-up of my eyes: enlightened, as though. I point to the bottle again. Kat, pauses, slowly shakes her finger at my head insistently shaking denial, looking at Kat; looking at Kat, her head, still then, nodding, instead.
But, thence the tone in the dialogues. First there had been the usual on communication, poetry, leading on to the utterance of the oral tradition, they even tested me in Oral English at my _Leaving. I, actually amazed at how Kat seemed to immediately guess/know what I was writing about. I had even taken pains at suggesting that the very shape of the mouth (and, tongue, of cause; being the communicator) would legitimise the true oral sound. Perhaps the dif. between “Om!” and “Open Sesame!”; other than the difference that the one is fiction: the true reason why the cave opened might have been the particular pronunciation; something an Ali Baba diversion would not have carried in its telling; almost forgetting—diverted that we may have been clued into remembering when exact sound may have been the answer: as Joshua might well have suggested.
—drewjthomas