Rocky says nothing.
“I’m losing my fucking mind, aren’t I?”
I think Rocky nods. I wish he would say something. I wish he would talk to me. Illusions are easy to form, but they’re impossible to put back together. They’re like humans in that way. It’s so hard to know if a thing is alive or dead. So hard. I smell that splinter of wood again, which still smells vaguely of the living, and I don’t know why, but my mind drifts to Alice Waters, whom I loved in high school, and who I used to write in the army because I didn’t know who else to write, and I wonder what she thought of all those batshit letters I sent, and if those letters smelled of someone who was alive and breathing and scared out of his fucking mind, or if maybe they just smelled of crazy and desperate and blood and thermite. Or if, like me, those old love letters just reeked to her of war.