Part 4

Before, before the moment of impact, before my eyes turned red and leaves were important, I was in love once. I can list things of before because they too make no difference. I once knitted a pink tea cosy. My shoe size was seven. I was in love. I would have been a policeman, or woman. I was in love with a boy, which further confuses the issue, leading me to assume I was a girl, for statistics sake at least. But if I was a girl, why should I be a girl now? And, of course, vice versa. I hope you can see my will starting to emerge from all these words, slippery as an eel and thrice as long. You can't shake hands with a clenched fist, my love told me once. Or I did.

It all comes back to the garden, to this moment in the garden and all of the other moments in all of the other gardens. The sun in my face, wishing I could dance, snow in my eyes, birds avoiding me, rain all over and not being able to feel a drop. You could call me redundant. I wouldn't. But you could. Another thing: you can't fool all of the people all of the time. I suppose I must live, in a fashion. If only I could find someone to explain me. Someone perhaps, who was there, at the dreadful moment of impact, who saw what happened. Did I change? Was it metamorphosis? Was I always like this? Did I love only myself? This leads me back to being both. Gender was the word, once, but it simply doesn't wash now.

A conundrum: if I remember things outside myself, a garden, birds, conundrums, the moment of impact, why not the things inside myself, what you might take to be real? Like me, for instance. Can these words be taken in evidence? Or used against me. Disproof. What if I killed someone? What if someone killed me? How I long for somebody, my will, the birds, to come along and sit next to me and answer my questions. And maybe touch me too, in the same moment. I breathe, and see. Somewhere, in all of this, perhaps in this very garden, perhaps before or at the time of the fatal impact, a crime has been committed. That is all my will can say. Again, evidence is a crucial requirement. Someone will have to bring me some evidence, and I will not be able to tell them what to do with it. Or move to do it myself. So we shall sit together in the harmony of silence and enjoy the garden. They eventually leave, and neither of us are disappointed, having forgotten the evidence, my thoughts, that precious awful moment of impact. I wonder which day it was that I was born. Touch my crushed mouth with another part of the body, breathing fine through the newer holes. Wishing I could still dance, I sit in the sun.