Child, does your mother know you are out here?
Who gave you the right to ask me that?
Your mother. Come here.
I don’t know. I am busy. Myself is trying to get his memories back and I keep moving them. Sometimes they are hidden in French. Other times…he’s not as smart as me.
Who isn’t?
Me. I feel sorry for him.
Why?
He can’t remember me.
That would be a loss, son. Why can’t he remember?
PTSD.
Then come right here, now.
***
So, you see the Child invents these mirrors that he gives to his friends, Charmain, and one look in the mirror, and they ask for help.
I think you need to find that child. Why?
Why did I invent the mirrors? Or why do you talk to the ceiling? My friend helped me. I was worried about my friends. I saw them detereating and I was worrying about them. So, he said that I could go out and have a good time with my friends and not have to preach to them and lose their friendship and that the adults would keep an eye on my friends this way for me.
So you give some of your friend’s hand mirrors?
Yeah. And they take care of my friends. And my friends and I go out and have fun.
***
Have a Pepsi and spend the day with us? Do you remember any more about Charmain?
Who?
Not funny.
Shhhh. He’s listening.
Are you two playing games?
He uses his wife’s name. He is a friend of mine that I made.
***
I thought I’d come in and stay awhile.
So how is my child doing?
I bought a bike with my friends, a ten speed. Can I call Charmain?
Would you like to go to the park with him today.
Yeah.
You playing that game? Is yourself guessing?
He figured it out.
That’s a tough spot in a poem to be about half way down and now he doesn’t feel like a dog.
Or a god. Yeah, I’d like to go to the park.
***
Maybe tomorrow the three of us can go see my new car.
I think we should enroll you in the school. In the HS this time about 11th grade.
Oh, Blessed One… how are the mountains this time of year?
I would like to attend school for a while and go to their library.
***
Now tell me more about this mirror?
Different friends I’ve given them to have them. You see yourself in the state you’re in and ask your friend for help.
Is that enough?
No. But your friend is. He’s trained.
Myself spent his school days at a boarding school. The day never ended and went home. You see, we graduated… Watson and I here, in third grade and they just let us attend. We have private tutors. We’re Linguistic Historians Watson and I. We constructed or a deduced most of the languages we know from History and the Bible by third grade. And our friends help us travel and stay with them.
***
The first time I ran away I was three, but I was the size of a five-year-old. I talked to myself in the future to ask myself his advice on where to go. I conjectured his responses.
And what did your older self say to you when you were running away?
He told me to trust no one. That I was just a child and that I might be wrong.
September 