The Colonel let go of my sweater, and I came to down and got the cigarettes. Not screaming, not through gripped teeth, not with the veins beating in my brow, but rather tranquility. Serenely. I peered down at the Colonel and said, “Screw you.” The vein-beating screaming came later after I had run across Highway 119 and through the quarter circle and across the soccer field and down the country road to the extension when I wound up at the Smoking Hole. I got a blue seat and tossed it against the solid divider, and the clank of plastic on concrete repeated underneath the scaffold as the seat fell flaccidly on its side, and afterward, I lay on my back with my knees looming over the cliff and shouted. I shouted because the Colonel was a smug, deigning charlatan, and I shouted because he was right, for I needed to accept that I’d had a mysterious love illicit relationship with Rosy. Did she adore me? Would she have left Sameer for me? Or then again was it simply one more hasty Rosy second? It was adequately not to be the last person she kissed. I needed to be the last one she adored. Also, I realized I wasn’t. I knew it, and I detested her for it. I despised her for not thinking often about me. I despised her for leaving that evening, and I detested myself, as well, since I let her go as well as since, supposing that I had been sufficient for her, she wouldn’t have even needed to leave. She would have recently lain with me and talked and cried, and I would have tuned in and kissed at her tears as they pooled in her eyes. I turned my head and took a gander at one of the little blue plastic seats on its side. I contemplated whether there could at any point be a day when I didn’t consider Rosy, puzzled over whether I should expect when she would be ancient history—reviewed distinctly on the commemoration of her demise, or half a month after, recollecting solely after it slipped having’s mind. I realized that I would know all the more dead individuals. The bodies heap up. Could there be a space in my memory for every one of them, or would I fail to remember a tad bit of Rosy consistently for the remainder of my life? Once, almost immediately in the year, she and I had strolled down to the Smoking Hole, and she hopped into Arya with her flip-slumps still on. She ventured across the Arya, picking her means cautiously absurd shakes, and snatched a waterlogged stick from the Arya bank. As I sat on the solid, my feet hanging toward the water, she toppled rocks with the stick and called attention to the skittering crayfish. “You bubble them and afterward suck the heads out,” she said enthusiastically. “That is the place where all the great stuff is—the heads.” She trained me all that I thought about crayfish and kissing and pink wine and verse. She made me extraordinary. I lit a cigarette and spit into the Arya. “You can’t simply make me extraordinary and afterward leave,” I said so anyone can hear her. “Since I was fine previously, Rosy. I approved of just me and final words and school companions, and you can’t simply make me extraordinary and afterward kick the bucket.” For she had exemplified the Great Perhaps—she had demonstrated to me that it was awesome to leave behind my minor life for more fabulous maybes, and now she was gone and with her my confidence in maybe. I could consider everything the Colonel said and did “fine.” I could attempt to imagine that I didn’t mind any longer, however, it would never be genuine again. You can’t simply make yourself matter and afterward kick the bucket, Rosy, because now I am hopelessly extraordinary, and I’m sorry I released you, indeed, yet you settled on the decision. You left me Perhaps less, stuck in your goddamned maze. Also, presently I couldn’t say whether you picked the straight and quick way out if you left me like this deliberately. Thus I never knew you, did I? I can’t recollect, because I won’t ever know. Also, as I rose to head back home and come to terms with the Colonel, I attempted to envision her around there, yet I was unable to recollect whether she folded her legs. I could in any case see her grinning at me with half of Mona Lisa’s smile, yet I was unable to picture her hands all around ok to see her holding a cigarette. I required I chose, to truly know her, since I required more to recollect. Before I could start the despicable interaction of failing to remember the how and the why of her living and kicking the bucket, I expected to learn it: How. Why. When. Where. What.