These are the voices in your neighborhead

In which our Hero conducts amazing and astounding achievements using talents of prestidigitation and divination achieved through the dedicated study of the mysterious and maleficient sorcerers of the far east, in whose company he has spent an uncountable number of years learning the twists and turns of the human mind. Unless you subscribe to the curious concept of unnatural numbers, at which point the number of years is both countable and zero.

The credits rolled and Nocturne said to me, “I need to make something to eat, I’m getting hungry.” And I don’t even remember what I said in reply except that it was germane only to that conversation and not this story so upon my words I shall not speculate at all very much. But I acknowledged her somehow, and we both checked into our computers for which to make determination upon the current state of the world and very much our email.

When my lady, after a brief intermission to listen to a rendition of Daft Punk’s Derezzed from the Tron Legacy soundtrack as performed with five floppy disk drives, said to me, something to the effect that “I should get up.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “You should make something to eat, you’re hungry.”

And my lady was astounded that I could not only read her mind but also know the very momentary temper of her body and she asked me with fervent amazement: “How did you know that! How did you know I was hungry?”

Well, this is not the first time that I have amazed my sweetheart by remembering something she’s told me but surely it is one of the shorter intervals between storage and retrieval and trying to keep myself from laughing, I couldn’t yet explain, so complained instead:

“Once in a while, it’s like only one of us is actually present while we have our conversations.”

Which would have been a clever accusation except I couldn’t stop laughing, and she, my lady, was laughing in response to me.

“But how did you know?”

“You told me. About 2 minutes ago!”

“I did?”

“Yes. You said, I’m hungry.”

“Yeah, I remember thinking that, but I didn’t think I’d said it out loud.”

“Well, with apologies, let me quote from The Simpsons: Out loud is where they can hear you.“

Nocturne considered the matter further.

“Maybe I was just talking to myself.”

Which ironically means that yes, only one of us was present in that conversation and it wasn’t me. Even if I was the only one to hear it.