“Fuck her.”  “Fuck him.”  As if years, decades, of a bewildering agglomeration of memories, feelings of love, feelings of rage, depression, could be coalesced into a simple, profane declaration; as if he could dismiss an entire connection, however flawed, even diseased, as if amputating a limb.

A funny and clicheed metaphor, that; it was one that he had heard repeatedly in the context of human relationships; often his own, specifically.  It was in paragraph three of Email the Latest: What kind of person are you, that you can cut off people who have done so much for you, like ambutating (sic) a limb?

Much was buried within the words — her words, as evidenced by occasional transitions from more or less logical English into discordant misspellings and grammatical errors; her words, interwoven with his father’s both inextricably and obviously, artlessly – a perverse analogue to what their relationship had revealed itself to be.  In sentence after sentence, he saw his father’s familiar and repeated phrasing interwoven with her own in a syntactical Frankenstein’s monster: dead and decaying thoughts, unexamined, unchallenged, long bereft of the benefit of wisdom, insight, or shame, repeated as if understanding were the result of attrition.

Of course, limbs were amputated all the time — some surgically, with precision, and forethought, and healing intent.  This flesh-eating bacteria will kill you if we don’t stop it in its tracks, and oh, sorry, that means that your tracks will have wheels from now on, que sera; sera.   Others, with sudden, horrifying violence; limbs that were ripped from the bodies that needed them, and whose absence took away part of what made one whole, and left mangled vestiges and scream-inducing nightmares behind.