The room is poorly lit. Feels like a grungy bar in here. Daphne is interviewing herself again. Sitting in the corner. Draped in shadow and cigarette smoke. Talking into a dictaphone. “A sneeze of a marriage. A romantic reflex…” I once discovered a whole folder of these auto-interview clips on her computer. Her just talking to herself. A lot like Jimmy Rabbitte on The Commitments except rather more weird and not at all funny. I have the distinct suspicion that she does this quite a bit when alone, these days. Practicing for some talkshow or another, the host’s particular style. Right now she’s using me as fodder. “I had always desired of that perfect boy meets girl narrative for my life. After all, what else is there? Girl meets boy who will suffice? That’s probably quite common actually. Ok. What about, Girl doesn’t meet boy at all and goes on a femme fatale killing spree? Or how about girl just doesn’t matter all that much and we focus on what boy does? Well, whatever the case, without one or more of those it won’t sell, you know…” Daph let out a little rum-soaked chortle as she leant through the cigarette smoke to look at me for the first time in about five minutes. Probably for effect and probably to see if I had stopped listening or nodded off. Although to me I feel she ultimately believes both of those things inconceivable in her company. Still, even in imagined stardom there must be cause for modicums of doubt. I shoot back a raised eyebrow as cognisance to her soliloquy. “I struggle with relationships in general,” she went on. “Our greatest trouble is that we are all refractions of one another. That’s the basis for how we think and act. And we magnify this in relationships. But if we’re all projecting poorly, if the medium we’re using is flawed, grimy, grotty, then we simply multiply our troubles into the neural equivalent of an atomic chain reaction. Cataclysm. Horrific. Unstoppable. Has social media not bore that out in excruciating detail? I think our first and only common goal should be to understand the value of our output – our work. Whatever that may be. Money is not the answer. I know that much… That solved, we might stand a chance of living together.” I hear the pause button engaged, she sighs deeply then disengages it, “Look, what Hank and I shared was both war and prayer. The death of a star, a sort of fading back-up singer truth. And so I don’t see any reason that would compel me to attach some sort of time signature to our relationship, as what, as some sort of all-too-common seal of approval? Fuck that. For each instance of a love such as ours has its value tied up in the inherent counter-intuitiveness of it all. In actuality, it’s a lovely decay in experience. One tends to think counter; that experience’s store is increased. Not so. What really occurs is the chance for more uncertainty to pervade, more novel ground. And uncertainty is the flux capacitor of love.” I smile to myself. I like that. The girl has a way with words. Time Travel. Yes. Maybe I’m the guilty man, always itching for that uncertain void with a Doc Brown eccentricity and intensity. That’s what always goes wrong. It’s always my fault. In the immediate aftermath of the relationship, it’s not something easily visible to the human eye but I see it now. The accent of a romantic bruise, a sort of poetic lividity yet to settle on the corpse, reflected so only by the combatants and those who know of its passing, those who might mourn it. Reflected opaquely in the soap scum on the black marble of the church altar, in the funeral rain running off the coffin wood. “Anyhow, that’s all I really have to say on the matter. I hope that helps you make peace with it, mother.”