I did that, and I still gained a pound! Oh well. That’s my hat. give it back to me. I usually don’t wear hats unless I’m mowing the grass—guess I might if I lost all the hair on top of my head, but that hadn’t happened yet.
The voice sounded kind of like a cross between my natural voice and AOC’s voice: that was the inverse of my shield, so I assumed that AOC was trying to talk to me. The other possibility was that Alex was trying to talk back to me; I didn’t think she was advanced enough to be thinking about things like this, but I considered the possibility that, since AOC and I were using Alex’s voice, Alex might have been getting a carbon copy or our discussions. She also might have been contributing to our discussions by talking to people and then, in her down time, reviewing what she’d said—in effect, saying it again.
Who’s hat, then? Or was somebody talking about me? I’d seen a book on how to play the guitar, recently, and I wondered if AOC were saying: you should pick up the guitar again and do it right. But, I explained, I wasn’t going to spend of bunch of time on songs without any opportunity for those songs to reach other people.
Then AOC said, “I wasn’t saying that.” Ok, so what was AOC saying? But secretly I thought that was what she was saying. You can come here—to me. “Where is that,” I asked. “New York,” she said. That, of course, must have been Alex’s condition—so I tried to talk to her vanity: “I’ll join you in DC.” Then I heard in Alex’s voice (my narrator combined with AOC’s voice), “I don’t want that. So we’d reached our first hurdle. But what was AOC saying? That’s not me. “What do you want?” I asked.
AOC: i want you to love me
“Me too!” But that sounded like my natural voice, my internal narrator, and AOC. So what the heck was that—unless that was Alex listening in (AOC and I were using her to define each other, so it seemed only natural that Alex might, at some point, contribute to the conversation (using the voice of her internal narrator, most likely).
Me: I can’t stand it. i can’t stand anything.
Lovely—I was telling myself that i’d remain impotent until my internal world matched up a little better with the world I was experiencing.
I was being born. I agreed: that was exactly what was happening with AOC, but wait, who says i had to be talking to AOC the child? I could have been talking to AOC the adult—this amazing artist that I wanted to be.
Me: I’m going to pass. I both heard that and repeated it, which means I approved the comment, probably from a higher power than me—who knew (sometimes) how to say what I was meaning to say before I said it—and repeated it such that everybody involved could hear it. I don’t know, however, what i was passing on.
My internal narrator: “Lunch.”
Or did I mean, Revenge? Me and AOC: “For what?”