Skunk
(crying): I think... the thing is, memory... I don’t understand anymore what’s
real, and not real, and I think as time moves on, or as you move through time,
that process of getting older, I find myself looking back and wondering... Things that I
remember happening, I wonder if they
really did happen or whether they were
just things that I thought about happening at the time, things I worried about,
or things that I feared would happen... And now, I don’t, I don’t, from this
distance, I have the strange sensation that sometimes things that I thought,
sometimes things that I thought about that didn’t happen, but I thought about
them so intensely at the time, they’re more real now than things that did
happen but that didn’t mean anything at the time. I’m left with a, a strange...
I’m left with a strange idea that my life, the life of mine that I remember is
not real, nothing is real, the only thing that’s real is the absolute, the
absolute second of existence, you know what I mean? In in that, the word I’ve
just said isn’t real, did I just say that? I’ll never know, because... you’re
the only one that heard me, and you won’t tell me, so nothing is real, the
future is as, is as concrete as the past... in a way I guess. I know the past,
my opinion of the past informs my present, and the present tense is the only
thing that is real, everything else is just abstraction. So many people have
passed through my life, and they’re, they have, they have gone now, and I can’t
understand that, I, there’s nothing I can do, I cannot, I cannot comprehend the
things that have happened to me, beyond knowing they’re, it’s some, I don’t
know...
To
anyone but Jesus himself all this would be unintelligible, the words not spoken
as such, but coughed and barked, retched
out in thick slabs of something not a voice.
Skunk:
Did I just, did I just say this already? About dreams and... Did I say that? I
don’t even know what I just said. How can I possibly formulate some opinion,
some notion of who I am, or what I’ve seen or what I, what I know, when I don’t
even know what I just said... I cannot comprehend, I can’t comprehend my body,
and... this sense of breathing and blood and my heartbeat, the pulse, my
organs, I don’t, I don’t know what... I
don’t know what any of this is... I just don’t know.
The
fire behind him has long burned out.
