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Show Moon -164 I wonder if Sheila, the pale butterfly girl with the scissors, is still here. I want everyone I have known to stay alive in me, no one forgotten, no one- especially no one without a voice-to be deprived of that little bit of immortality called Being Remembered. I like to think she made it out of here, maybe found an open-hearted man who keeps her in a house near the woods where she's getting back her memories by writing poems. I walk down one of the paths, a prudent distance from the nearest crocodile, and I breathe in the smells of grass and trees, steam rising from the laundry. Smell is the source of the truest memories. Such memories are not contaminated by words. And sure enough, I begin to be lifted into a mood which is haunting, strange, and certainly true. Without words I do not know what this mood means. Thousands of years ago, smell probably did more for people, or perhaps it was that people then didn't demand the pictures that complex languages have taught us to expect. The experts say that the way the brain is constructed, smell resides in the center of memory. If memory adds up to who we think we are, then why do we scrub and spray so hard against the smells of our bodies? Would we rather not be remembered, not even by ourselves? I find a story for this place: Mark is walking down this path toward me, his head still thick with that wonderful European hair now streaked with gray so that he looks, oddly, sort of like James. He is staring at his long unusual hands and hasn't noticed me. I have an impulse to hide behind one of these generous oak trees, but I dismiss the idea because I tend to enjoy difficult and therefore interesting encounters, and there's enough fatalism~or faith-in me to think: |