In typical fashion, things stopped being wholly themselves and took on additional duties as horrible reminders, as they're usually called, mournful memory triggers. Anything, a cup or a street. He didn't want this, he wanted Blissful Oblivion, the Release of Forgetting, all that business. People drink, or travel. Or travel someplace and drink. Too glamorous for him, instead he shambled around his little room in a bathrobe and muttered. Studio apartments are cruel, he thought. The people who are most likely to need ample pacing room are always the ones trapped in tiny efficiencies. He thought, memory isn't very sophisticated is it. The filtering mechanisms aren't too impressive. Why should I have to cope. Who decided coping was a good enough solution, like pulling your sleeve down over a gaping wound. We forget important things all the time, how old am I for example? I have to think about it a moment, after 21 the years tend to bleed into each other. Who cares anyway. State your name and age please. State your name and occupation. Nice to meet you, what do you do? You can't get a handle on someone that way, so why ask? He thought, it's never once occurred to me to ask how old someone is or what they do for a living. The story of him, The Story of R, impossible. Not that he's any kind of special case. Even the much more limited story, the sub-story, of R and S, is impossible. It's not a story, how could it be. It's an emotion, is what it is, or a gnarled cluster of feelings and associations. A clump. Once S had gone away, so should've the gnarled cluster, it's only fair. It's grotesquely residual, like a phantom limb after an amputation.