everybody has a regina molesworth.
a person who means more to them than life itself.
you have one. or maybe more than one.
don’t lie. you know you do.
maybe some people might even get their regina molesworth to like them.
or pretend they like them.
it took me a long time to figure out what regina molesworth really is.
she is life itself.
and life is time.
and time never stops for anybody.
no matter how often you tell it how much you love it.
all right, that is enough philosophy.
oh yes, i am a philosopher.
why, you ask, did i become a philosopher?
for the same reason anybody becomes a philosopher.
because i had a lot of time on my hands.
you say “time on your hands” but what you mean is time on your brain.
i had a lot of time on my hands/brain.
even after i started going to school, even though i had to do homework.
one thing about my mom and dad, they never pestered me about my homework.
or cared about how i did in school.
or even if i went to school. though it did not occur to me until many years later that i could have gotten away with not even going to school. oh well.
but anyway i did go to school.
and there i saw regina molesworth.
and my whole life was changed.
actually not changed - revealed.
before i went to school i did not know the basic fact of life.
that it is war.
war every minute of every day.
even though i made up stories about knights and princesses and castles and battles i thought of them as faraway things.
and did not suspect the warlike reality of everyday everything.
before i saw regina i was always just myself.
it never occurred to me that i could be anybody but myself.
who else was i going to be?
my mom? my dad?
the mailman?
the teenage boy with the ducktail haircut who delivered pizza or hoagies to us when mom didn’t feel like cooking? (which was most of the time.)
the polite teenage boy with the crew cut who delivered groceries sometimes?
the animals i saw in the moonlight?
the princesses and such in those stories i made up playing with matches? it never crossed my mind that i could actually be them - they were just make believe.
this writing my story is easy but there is one thing i find that i did not suspect...
it is hard to write like one thing just happened after another.
when different things always happened all at once.
i haven’t explained about my playing with matches.
or what my mom was like and what she did all day.
and what my dad was like and what he did all day.
and i can only describe what they did.
who knows what they were thinking?
so maybe i will try to describe all these things before i get to regina and how she became the story of my life.
of course describing regina in some ways will not be so hard since she became so famous and so many people already know so much about her.
or think they do.
although my regina is different from theirs.
even though i achieved a little bit of fame myself - nothing like regina’s of course - nobody was ever really interested in me - “for myself”, if i may coin a phrase - so i do not think there is any me but me, if you get my drift.
nobody was ever motivated to imagine a different me.
so i am just me.
nobody but me.
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