"I don't know. Four years ago, maybe."
"Forlorn Hilda. Not all that much different than Rita/Lily Lily/Rita. Das stimmt, nitch wahr?" [That's so, isn't it?] spoke the Higher Authority, for a moment changing the conversation into German.
"Oh, please, you got that from Adagio. He doesn't know what he is talking about."
"Doesn't he? He knows. I know. You know. Dear, silly little Gabriele, you are hallucinating desertions of mom and dad in all things. So you desert rather than be deserted. Remember that with kings and paupers, with great and small creatures, one can have such sweet connections, but you have to leave Fort Gabriele first."
"This mixing is a diluting of potential. Most people don't know themselves and have never had an interesting thought all their born days because they are scared to sit down with themselves for a minute. They flit around as social butterflies when they are gadflies to me. You make me sound as a nut with a major behavioral disorder. I guess you would have more grounds to call me autistic. I just don't have this strong yearning to drive myself into the thick part of the herd. If one is such a deviant, they think she is crazy. Their negative judgments are meant to pillory a person to drive him or her back into the herd.
"Just because someone has gone from a person's life doesn't mean she cannot be ebullient with that entity. The more beings that are there in the heart the more alive he or she will be! It is that simple: love and be loved!"
"Oh, you sentimental creature. Heart— is that the receptacle of these highly prized human emotions for contemporary man? …th emotions that make humans slaughter each other. The Egyptians thought this heart was the receptacle of thought. You make me want to puke using such silly words frivolously to reflect nothing. You talk abstractions of heart and love like such a sophist."
"Gabriele, dear stupid Gabriele of such wasted intelligence, were you really so smashed by that tank which your parents drove off in? Has life really been so flat ever since? Have you never considered that human relationships in particular are like the beautiful scents of flowers and these scents are the interaction with other entities."
"Nay, these scents as you call them are manipulative forces—the flower trying to attract the bee to pollinate its kind, the gentleman wanting to get laid, the smiling businessman trying to woo in the money. I am sick of this flowery gunk. Matter of fact I'm damn sick and sick of you! Be gone with you, Mosquito!" And so she shooed her Higher Authority away.
She thought about that time a year ago when her hubris was so indefatigable. Hadn't she told herself back then that, should it take place, his return to Sharon would be a detachment of no more sentimental value than an extracted tooth? Then, visibly upset one given day, he announced to her that he really meant it and would be leaving immediately. It was only in her phlegmatic folding of his clothes, packing his bags, calling a taxi for him, and seeing him go away in it, that she put consistent direction into the distraught boy's ambivalent and floundering movements. Back then he couldn't even pack a suitcase for himself, as discombobulated as his thoughts were. Back then she was so dangerously obdurate as if she were not mortal at all and had no connection to these lesser beings. Still she supposed that if he had not been refused, and had not retreated home in that same taxi, she could not have maintained her dignified stoicism indefinitely. Losing another boy to Sharon, she might well have eventually fallen into a nadir or great depression like an apoplexy felling her into a great sleep. Change, that tempest of discontent, made deciduous waste of all this impermanence that always left a person long before she would leave herself at her demise. Maybe it was auspicious that her will had been thwarted. At the time she even sensed some external force upon her that was trying to stymie her recalcitrant will. Were these the feelings of a secondary will or was it the voice of God trying to choke deleterious determination before she was choked by it? This too was an unknown. And time went by like a shell-shocked soldier.