The Story About the Bird

While texting Benjamin about current goings-on, I said, “Remind me to tell you about my harrowing experience with the bird. It’s too much to type on mobile.”

“Aww, did you try to save a dying bird?” he asked, immediately thinking of the sweetest possible scenario.

“No,” I replied. “It was out for blood.”

“I’m pretty sure birds can’t become vampires…” he texted back.

---

Honestly, we thought it was a bat at first. We'd have a nice dinner out, get home late, walk up to the front door and this... THING... would shoot out of the eaves and fly erratically away. “Should we install one of those bat houses?” we asked ourselves. “Nah,” we said. “It's probably a bird.”

It's definitely a bird. Let me tell you how I know.

This is not a story about me bravely overcoming adversity and heroically facing my fears. This is a story of cowardice of the worst kind.

So, given that it’s coming from me, all of you should be used to this sort of thing by now.

Matt was out of town. I was cleaning up the house before video games and bed. I had cleaned up the dinner dishes, put away my yoga mat, and fed the cats. All that remained was to take out the trash. I didn't need a jacket, of course. Twenty degrees or not, the trash bin was all of ten feet from the door. How long would it take, right?

See, that right there is the sort of thinking that gets people killed in serial killer movies.

As I stepped outside, I startled the bird. It flew down from above the porch light, ruffling my hair as it passed. I cursed, watching it fly out into the night, and picked the trash back up, having dropped it to cover my head with my hands. “Hello to you too,” I said, crossing the driveway and depositing the trash into the bin.

The trouble started when I turned back toward the house, the bird having already done so. It swooped from it's perch on the light fixture and hovered, chirping, in front of my face. I, very bravely, did not scream like a little girl. “Oh!” I said (calmly, I swear). “Thought I'd be gone longer than that?” I waited for it to fly away.

It did not.

“Um, okay...” I said. “Shoo!”

“Screw you!” said the bird. “It's warm over here!” Or, that's what it would have said if birds could speak. I imagine. I mean, I don't speak bird.

I waited, afraid it would claw me in the face. “It'll fly off,” I thought. So I waited. And I waited.

“Okay, it's too cold for this,” I said, ten minutes later. “It's a tiny bird. It'll fly away. This is not a Hitchcock movie. I'll be fine.” I took a step forward.

The bird looked me in the eye and very deliberately turned tail and flew into the house.

Or, he would have if he hadn't slammed head first into the (closed) screen door and flopped pathetically to the porch.

“Oh my God, I've killed it!” I said, reaching out with both hands.

The bird, very much alive, was having none of it. Twittering, it rose from the cold concrete like a small and very fluffy phoenix, hovering two feet off the ground as it scrabbled at the closed screen door. “Maybe I can just slip through the door... If I'm quick enough, it won't fly in after me,” I thought. Meanwhile, the bird “thwopped” against the door with a soft sound, a quiet sound, like unenthusiastic applause or a teddy bear falling off a bed.

Just the sort of sound, naturally, that could pull the cats out of a sound sleep. They materialized on the other side of that screen door as if they'd been summoned from the bedroom in some sort of arcane ritual. The oblivious bird hovered before their eyes, like an angelic visitation.

Slipping through the door was right out, not without the cats rushing out and the bird rushing in.

“Okay,” I said to myself. “I'll go through the back door... which is locked. And I don't have my keys.”

Inside, the cats began singing enthusiastic songs of romance, inviting the bird to come inside for cocktails and a light snog.

“I'll get the blanket out of the car and throw it over the bird... Except the car's locked. And I have no keys,” I thought.

One of the cats reached a tentative paw toward the glass, as if unsure this beautiful, amazing creature really existed.

“If only I had something to wave at it,” I thought. “Something like a jacket, for example.”

And then, both cats stretched up in undisguised glee, their declawed front feet swishing softly against the door, which jiggled, unlatched, in it's frame. Their full weight would push it open any moment now.

“I'll just call someone to come rescue me...” I thought, “from a small, frightened bird.” This, my friends, is what they call a low point.

I was out of options, freezing, faced with the cats' imminent escape. Now was the time for action.

---

“What did you do?” my mom asked when I told my parents about it over lunch. “Did you scare it away?”

“Oh, heck, no! I waited for it to fly off on its own!” I said. “I didn't want it to claw my face or peck out my eyes.”

“Was it a swallow?” asked dad.

“No, it was a male house finch,” I said.

“How do you know?” said mom.

“I had plenty of time to survey the markings. I'm absolutely sure.”

So that’s the story about the bird.

More Inappropriate Things

This very terrible trait I have, this tendency to say inappropriate things, where does it come from?

It’s not much of a mystery. I’m surrounded by friends and loved ones who say inappropriate things.

---

Benjamin and I listened attentively as coworker Stephanie described her course work to become a speech teacher. Although I had studied linguistics in college, I had never delved into speech language pathology. Apparently, it’s very deep.

“Fetuses? What does that have to do with it?” said Benjamin, after Stephanie said she had spent an entire class period looking at fetal development pictures and needed to write an essay about it.

“Because most of these speech problems come from birth defects,” said Stephanie. “We had to look at like two hundred of these pictures!”

“Sounds exhausting,” I said. “And somewhat disturbing.”

“Aw, I thought they were cute! Such adorable little monkey fish baby things!"

Benjamin coughed in surprise. “Is that seriously how you’re going to describe the miracle of human life?”

“I’m sorry, but that’s what fetuses look like. Monkey fish baby things.”

---

The waitress had just placed our bowls in front of us, but after my phone buzzed for the fifth time, I couldn’t resist checking the screen. “Sorry! It’s all these birthday greetings! I don’t mean to be rude,” I said to my grandmother, who was treating me to lunch.

“Oh, no, sweetie! You respond to those birthday greetings! I understand,” she assured me.

“Huh…”

“What is it?”

“It isn’t a birthday greeting after all. It’s Sandy and Randi messaging me about our upcoming New Years Eve party. Something about a choice between wine or Fruit Loop flavored vodka…”

Grandma nodded, sipping her tea. “Go for the vodka,” she said. “It’ll get the job done quicker.”

---

On Christmas Eve, we all sat around looking at family pictures together on the big screen, from a hard drive connected to Dad’s Apple TV. Matt got up to get more pizza and asked if I would like any. Before I could answer, I was distracted by the boisterous after-dinner conversation.

“And do you know how I learned to swim?” my brother Josh said, when the discussion turned toward the swimming pool in grandma’s yard, filled in a few years ago to make a garden when she and grandpa grew tired of maintaining it. “Dad was all like, ‘Go down the slide without your floaties on! I’ll catch you!’ And did he catch me? No!”

Everyone laughed, including Josh, who went on to say, “And you wonder why I have trust issues!”

“That’s just like how my brothers taught me to swim,” our other grandpa said. “They rowed me out to the middle of the pond and threw me in! And I’ll tell you what, the hardest part was getting out of that sack. After that, swimming was easy!”

---

“You mean to say you have no idea what your test will be about?” I asked Kristina who was freaking out.

“Nope.”

“It’s not in the text book?”

“No, he went over the whole thing in class!” she lamented.

“Were you absent that day? Couldn’t you just borrow the notes from someone else?”

“No, I was there! But it was just so boring! So boring, and the room was really warm and the chair was really comfortable, so like I was fighting sleep the whole time and I have NO IDEA what he was talking about,” she said, slouching defeated in her chair. “After the first ten minutes, he could have been talking about how to make baby soup for all I know.”

I stopped short as her last sentence sank in. “Baby soup?” I asked.

She nodded. “Baby soup.”

“The whole world of provocative topics to choose from and you go with baby soup?”

“You need to know how comfortable that chair was!”

---

I had just rolled another gutter ball to no one’s surprise but my own. “I really thought I’d get it that time…” I said, sitting down with my friends as Matt got up to take his turn. Dave patted my shoulder consolingly.

“You’ll get it,” said Sarah.

“All we have to do,” said Alex, continuing a conversation I was late to join, “is gather them all up and put them on an island.”

“To what end?” said Zach.

“To their end!” said Alex. “Just get rid of the lot of them and never look back!”

Dave nodded sagely. “They’d all die off eventually.”

“You don’t think they’d just escape the island and come back?” asked Sarah.

“That’s the way with politicians!” said Dave. “They’d just keep delegating everything. Before they could search for food, they’d have to form a coconut finding committee, then the coconut picking committee, then the coconut preparation committee and the coconut distribution committee…”

“I mean, we’d at least leave them tools and things! No one would be able to say we left them all there to die!” said Alex.

“And waste perfectly good tools?” said Zach. “Oh, heck no!”

---

Board games in the Hamilton house are serious business, comparable to gladiatorial combat, as I was reminded over the family vacation last summer when, in a riveting game of King of Tokyo, Curtis’s tiny cardboard giant monster killed off all of our tiny cardboard giant monsters one by one.  Matt and I watched as it all came down to Curtis and Leann, son vs. mother.

And then Curt annihilated Leann with a single roll of the dice.

“Bastard!” she cried.

“Leann,” I said meekly. “What does it mean when you call your own son a bastard?”

It means we all say inappropriate things.

Inappropriate Things

“Did you ever know (name redacted)?” said Kenzi at D&D one night.

“Oh, gosh, yes,” I said, recalling the socially awkward guy in question.

“Yeah, he got married. They have three kids now.”

“How?” I said. “Was it Stockholm Syndrome?”

Which was not at all what I intended to say.

---

Sometimes I say inappropriate things.

It’s not intentional. Mostly. Usually. Quite often really.

Honestly, I wonder if I might have some kind of brain damage that stops me from thinking before I speak.

---

When my friend Tiffany and I were training for a 5k together, we tried every tip and trick in the book (the book in this case being the most recent issue of “Runner’s World” magazine). We did intervals, ran sideways and backwards, stopped at park benches to do push-ups – basically, anything we could come up with that allowed us to actually run less. One day, Tiffany mentioned something new.

“Fartleks?” I asked.

“It’s a Swedish word,” she said. “It's a type of sprinting.”

Later, Benjamin asked us how the training was going.

“Very well!” I said. “Tiffany and I went fartleking after work and it was sooo hard and we were all out of breath and sweaty. Her husband's out of town, so she had nothing else to do, and mine's cool with it. But man, are my thighs sore!”

Benjamin opened his mouth as if to say something, then quickly shut it in a shoddy attempt to suppress wheezes of laughter.

“That’s… actually not as dirty as it sounds,” I said lamely.

---

One morning after a workout, Matt and I stumbled back home from the gym.

“I’m going to be so sore later, I can tell,” said Matt. “I’m tired now!”

“Tired? Don’t you mean virtuous?” I asked him.

He said, “Oh, sure. Is that what that feels like?”

“Of course! Being virtuous feels terrible! Why did you think it was so hard?” I said.

He chuckled. “That must be why all those virtuous saints and martyrs died horrible deaths...”

“Yeah, it’s true. Remember all those times as teenagers when we DIDN'T have sex because it would have been wrong? Remember how that felt? That was virtue.”

Matt grimaced at the bitter taste of truth. “Virtue is such a cockblock,” he said.

“No, wait! Virtue is supposed to be a good thing! Don’t listen to me!”

---

“It’s this great exhibit I saw once,” I said, describing Body Worlds for my coworkers. “There was like a mad scientist or something, and he took these bodies that had been donated for science and preserved them by injecting them with some kind of liquid plastic. They’re all posed in interesting ways to show how complicated the human body is.”

“It sounds disturbing,” said Benjamin.

“No, it’s great how all the organs in the torso fit right together! Like, God must be awesome at Tetris.” I said.

“I bet,” said Tiffany. “He's probably got the high scores. He totally rocks at Tetris.”

“Oh, not the high scores, surely,” I said. “He’s really more of a Sims guy.”

---

As I walked out the door, I gave myself the pat-down: checking each of my pockets in turn, to be sure I had my wallet, phone, and keys.

Quoting Austin Powers, Matt said, “’Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch...’ So, do you have your testicles with you, then?”

I said, “Well, are you coming with me?”

“What’s that got to do with it?” he asked.

“Because anybody only ever needs one, you know. That's why you have two of them. You're meant to share.”

---

“It was terrible!” I said, after Tiffany and I finished our 5k. It had been around the city park in front of the library, so afterwards we had stopped in to apprise Benjamin of our experience. “They laid it out all wrong! At the three mile mark they had us circle the pond again instead of heading directly to the finish line. It was more than FOUR miles!”

“That’s silly!” Benjamin said. “All they had to do was follow the route the city uses for all its other races!”

“Right, but this one wasn’t sponsored by the city – the CITY would have put more than one water station in. Seriously, only one water station at the one mile mark! They could at least have put in another one if they were going to make us run FOUR FREAKING MILES!”

Tiffany sighed. “At least our entry fees went to benefit that little girl with leukemia,” she said, charitably.

I made a bitter face. “Yeah, well, I bet SHE didn’t have to run four miles!” I said, because sometimes I say inappropriate things.

100 Word Increments: Growing Old is Mandatory.

Next week is my birthday. I’ll be 32.

“Does it make you feel old?” my mother-in-law asked me after Christmas dinner.

“Not at all,” I said. “I’m aiming for thirty five. After that, I’ll celebrate the anniversary of my thirty fifth birthday every year.” I told her about my favorite Oscar Wilde quote: “Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.”

“Wonderful!” she said. “I enjoyed being thirty five for about twenty years.”

We had a good laugh about that.

---

When I was five years old, I decided being a kid was awful. No one listened to my opinions on world events. I couldn’t buy my own toys or set my own bedtime. I had zero say in what was for dinner.

Worse yet, I was bad at being a kid. I was bad at playground games and making friends. I was bad at being stupid and impulsive.

However, I was brilliant at self-denial, planning ahead, and budgeting my allowance.

I just knew I’d be good at being old, in a way that I was never good at being young.

---

One day in November, as I entered the Goodwill store, several vibrant signs proclaimed, “Senior Day: Twenty Percent Off for Senior Citizens”.

“Are you eligible for our senior discount today?” I heard the cashier asking a tiny black woman who was very obviously eligible for the discount.

“Oh, no, honey,” the tiny woman said. “I’m only 39.”

Lady, are you kidding me? Pride is one thing, but twenty percent off is something else altogether! If you’re not going to take the discount, at least give it to me! For crying out loud, I could have saved, like, three whole dollars!

---

As we drove to the art museum earlier this month, my grandmother regaled me with descriptions of the delightful senior’s luncheon to which she had escorted an older woman she knows from church. “It was great!” she said, then hastened to add, “I wasn’t old enough to go, of course. It was all for Dottie.”

“Of course,” I said, motioning for her to continue.

I wisely refrained from commenting when, upon arriving at the museum, grandma bought herself one senior admission, and didn’t pay until after checking with the girl at the counter to be sure her discount was applied.

---

“It’s great getting old, because you don’t have to pretend anymore. You can say whatever’s on your mind. People expect you to be cranky at my age, so I get away with it,” an older friend from work told me not too long ago. As she finished speaking, she ran her fingers through her hair and came away with hair on her fingers. She ‘tsked’, as if the situation, while disappointing, was not unusual. “Just FYI,” she said, catching my horrified gaze, “when you get old, your hair falls out. Wouldn't want you to be surprised.”

“So noted” I said.

---

Last week, Randi lamented that, while she was stocking up for our New Years Eve party, neither of the liquor stores she visited carded her. “How many bottles of wine do I need to bring?” she asked sadly. “I have three, but I would kind of like to drink one tonight.”

I winced for her but I’ve never been carded myself. As someone who was bad at being young and impulsive, I was at least twenty-eight – well past the point of carding – before I ever bought anything at a liquor store.

…I wonder if liquor stores have senior citizen discounts?

The Bunnies Must Die

The article came out in December of 1996. I know this because I ripped it out of the National Geographic magazine and kept it in a file. I still have it. It was the picture that did it, you see: two men standing in front of a truckload of dead rabbits.  

No, literally. There was a truck. The bed of the truck was loaded end to end with expired bunnies.

The article explained, very briefly, that Australia had a severe rabbit problem and that hunters like those in the picture killed millions of rabbits - a nonnative, invasive species - each year in an effort to save the native Australian animals that the rabbits were eating out of house and home. Now, scientists were creating rabbit-specific viruses in order to protect the Australian environment, but were subsequently putting such hunters out of a job.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it, such controversy over so small (and fuzzy) a thing. Seriously, rabbits? Who knew?

Not long afterwards, I discovered a different magazine that had more to say on the topic of Australian rabbits. Apparently some clever Aussies, realizing how hard it is to look good while killing small defenseless rabbits, were trying to rebrand themselves as the savior of the adorable, rabbit-like, 100% native-to-Australia Bilby. There was even a petition to replace the Easter Bunny (with an Easter Bilby, of course). This article, too, with its headline that read simply “Bunnies Must Die!”, was ripped from its magazine and placed in a file.

---

Sometime later, my tenth grade English teacher made an announcement: we were starting our nonfiction unit, which would culminate in a research paper. We were free to choose any topic we wanted.

Oh, I could not wait.  

Finally, a chance to tell my classmates about this topic that had been so much on my mind for so many months! One cannot (or could not in those days) simply walk up to one's friends and say, “So have you heard this thing about the rabbits in Australia?” It just wasn't done. Now, I could lay it all out for my peers and foster a genuine discussion.

On the one hand, I loved animals, and rabbits were animals, and hunters were killing them in droves! On the other hand, I loved animals, and koalas were animals, and the rabbits were killing them in droves too! Plot twist: rabbit hunting created jobs, jobs easily attained by aborigines and unskilled laborers, while government-created rabbit-specific super-viruses not only killed defenseless rabbits but also destroyed jobs!

This would be the most thought-provoking paper of all time!

---

When it was time to present my report to the class, I was ready. I had an essay. I had sources. I had pictures. I felt that my cause was just and that my ways were justified. I volunteered to go first.

“And so, as you can see,” I said, “when you consider the research costs and the potential for dangerous mutations, these viruses aren’t the answer. Keeping the hunters employed is better for the economy. Either way, the bunnies must die.” At the conclusion of my report, my classmates and teacher stared at me in wide-eyed astonishment.

“Well, that was certainly interesting,” said my teacher as I took my seat. “Thank you, Tori. Who's next?”

That was it. So anti-climactic! No discussion, no questions, no arguments. Total silence. And into that total silence, my friend Ryan, who sat behind me, whispered, “Oh my God, Tori! Do you have any idea how heartless you sounded just now?”

“No. Why?”

---

“Rabbit killer,” they called me.

For weeks, I couldn’t sit through lunch in the cafeteria without saying, “No, you don't understand! It's only the ones in Australia that matter!”

The idea that you have no interest in killing ALL rabbits, only those in a specific geographic region, is apparently too broad of an idea for most 14-year-olds to grasp. Pictures of adorable bunnies showed up in my locker like fluffy accusations. One vegetarian classmate refused to speak to me at all. My best friends thought the situation was hilarious and cackled with glee as they chanted, “The Bunnies Must Die!” in their best maniacal voices.

I fumed, and I seethed, and I waited for the whole mess to go away forever.

---

“So can we talk about this thing with the rabbits in Australia?” a classmate asked before school one day.

“Oh, can we not?” I said, rolling my eyes.

“It’s just that I saw this and thought of you.” She held her hand out to me. “Blue’s your favorite color, right? Go ahead, take it. I got it from one of the prize machines at the grocery store.”

It was a lucky rabbit’s foot.

“Thank you,” I said, tying it to a zipper of my backpack. “I’m, uh…” I fumbled for something suitable to say. “I’m really not a rabbit killer, you know?”

“Oh, sure,” she said. “Just the ones in Australia. I get it.”

And that was the last I ever heard of it.

The Santa Claus Incident

Scrolling through Facebook one day, I noticed that my fifteen-year-old niece was upset with a TV show. “Dang it Attack on Titan... Whyyyyy would you do this to me?” her status said. She had just watched episode 5, where one of the main characters dies dramatically. “They ripped my heart out!” she said, posting a picture of herself in full ugly-cry mode.

“I recommend you get used to it...” one unsympathetic friend commented.

“Really??? Your kidding?” she replied, with a cavalier approach to grammar.

“It gets a lot worse...” said another.

“I don't think I can prepare for more,” she lamented. “I mean, this is worse then Game of Thrones...”

Oh, you sweet summer child, I thought, laughing as I wondered how she’d react to the rest of the show, in which almost everyone dies horribly.

But when my laughter subsided, I sighed. I was being unfair: this might be a Santa Claus incident.

---

When I got home after second grade one day, my mother asked how my day had been and I told her about the argument between my classmates. Half of them had decided they were too cool to believe in Santa Claus anymore, while the other half clung to their beliefs with a zeal that could have rivaled the Spanish Inquisition. The argument had eventually spiraled out of control, derailing the math lesson for nearly half an hour while the teacher sent the chief instigators to the office and calmed several other children down.

“And which side were you on?” mom asked me.

“Oh, neither,” I said. “I read a storybook while they talked.”

Mom nodded solemnly, then took me out for ice cream so that she could soften the blow of telling me Santa Claus was not real. “Since your classmates are talking about it, I wanted you to hear it from me,” she said. “Your daddy and I are the ones who put out presents on Christmas morning.”

I took the news rather calmly. “Okay,” I said, and I really was okay with it. My older brother had already hinted at as much, and I had decided that Santa Claus could be not real if he wanted to be, as long as I still got presents.

I listened as my mother explained how heartbroken she had been as a child when she learned Santa wasn’t real, how she wanted more than all the world to spare me what she went through. “Just remember that Santa Claus is always real in your heart,” she said, choking back tears.

“Okay,” I said again, staring at my ice cream.

I felt bad for not feeling bad about it.

You see, for my mother, learning the truth about Santa Claus was an incident. For me, it was not.

---

My Santa Claus incidents, and there have been several, have not been about Santa Claus at all.

Do you have any idea how upset I was as a child to learn that Muppets were not real? We’re talking nuclear grade devastation. No amount of comforting ice cream was going to smooth this tantrum over. I was a wreck for weeks. To put it in the modern parlance, four-year-old me just “could not even”.

And can we talk about how I mourned for Optimus Prime? “Oh, honey,” parents and grandparents said. “The Transformers aren’t real, so he isn’t really dead.” This is surprisingly unhelpful, but thanks for trying.

There have been books I’ve literally thrown across the room because they didn’t end the way I hoped they would, leaving me feeling both traumatized and betrayed. Critics say, “It had to end that way for literary reasons!” Screw them.

There have been TV shows the left holes in my life when they were cancelled. “What am I going to do with myself at 7:00PM on Tuesdays?” I asked. “Just watch something else,” people said. IT ISN’T THAT EASY, YOU UNFEELING WRETCHES!

These are Santa Claus incidents. Not the big things, the real things like deaths or divorces or house fires, but the grief for things not real. Did anyone think to take you out for ice cream when Superman died? Did anyone lovingly comfort you after “The Reichenbach Fall”? No one did for me, but it would have been nice if someone had thought of it.

---

So I called my niece. “I saw your Facebook post,” I said. “Are you okay?”

She sniffled. “Yes.”

I made a mental note to buy her ice cream later.

A Letter to Benedict Cumberbatch

Dear Mr. Cumberbatch,

I recently moved back to my hometown in Oklahoma, having spent several years as a librarian in south central Kansas. Most people know about Kansas from The Wizard of Oz, but, although we do often get tornadoes in this part of the country in the springtime, I’m reasonably sure none of them have ever carried me away to a magical realm. I say “reasonably sure” because it is apparently possible that such a thing has happened and I have forgotten. I am assuming I have you to thank for that.

You see, Mr. Cumberbatch, as I was working at the library one day, I came across this DVD:

And one item in particular grabbed my attention:

Namely, my name.

Now, to the best of my recollection, I have never been on a sailing voyage – or even a pretend sailing voyage! – with you. I am quite certain this is the sort of thing I would remember even if I were not known among my peers for my excellent memory (which I am). There was nothing for it but to watch this movie and see where I fit in, in the hopes that it might spark a remembrance.

Sadly, it seems all of the footage featuring me ended up on the cutting room floor (only to be expected, I’m afraid, as I am a terrible actor). Try as I might, I was unable to dredge up any memory of this nautical-themed period of my life or the adventures we had!

At first, naturally, I was devastated! How could I have forgotten our time together? The witty conversations, the high jinks on the high seas, the abiding yet entirely platonic relationship we very definitely had (I am happily married and doubtless you were a perfect gentleman at all times)! Why, if only this DVD had never come to my attention, hinting at all these things but shedding light on none of them, I could go back to my old life in peaceful obliviousness like Donna Noble at the end of season 4 of the new Doctor Who when the Doctor had to block her memories of him in order to save her life…

And that’s when it hit me:

You’re a Time Lord!

Yes! It’s so obvious! You’re a Time Lord and are currently living under an assumed name, cleverly disguised as an actor. Because, let’s face it, when it comes to names invented by aliens who haven't quite got the hang of human aliases, “Benedict Cumberbatch” is right up there with “Ford Prefect”.

(Yes, yes, I’m quite aware of your claim that you received this impressive name from your “parents”. “Parents” who are both actors, who have even – it begs pointing out – played the part of your “parents” on TV. I may not be as clever as an immortal Time Lord, but trust me when I say that no Earthling is going to fall for that.)

Of course, I’ve seen Doctor Who: I know how this works. Whatever you’ve done to block my memories of our time together is certainly for my own good. You miss me, I know, but while I may use the occasional Sherlock marathon to indulge in a bit of wistful sentiment for what could have been, I have no regrets, and neither should you.

Be strong.

You needn’t reply. I just wanted you to know that, while I may not remember any of it, I do know it happened.

Sincerely,
Tori