Memoirs of a Miniature

 

The only way Tony could remember something specific was to remember everything as a list that excluded the one thing he wanted to remember, thus remembering the thing omitted rather than the rest of the list, however long the list happened to be. Today the word he wanted to remember was the name of the young woman who had befriended him as a child, and stayed his friend through thick and thin in whatever the cost of living crisis brought them both, including the fact that Tony never grew beyond what Walter de la Mare called a midget although today I would eschew such a word for you to use, and so I try to remember all the other words I want you to forget, like dwarf or gnome or whatever Gulliver called the people of Lilliput that I have forgotten. Meanwhile, the woman, later that same day, when he couldn’t find her in their roofless mansion at a crucial time he needed her most, it was her name he sought instead, a name that so easily slipped his mind, especially when in the darkest of places in which he often found himself, and he so desperately needed to call for her help today but merely mewed out meaningless bleats interspersed with other names in his lengthening list of choices that he knew she wasn’t called in the systematic hope he would have to eventually hit on the right one, because every list is finite, except every list isn’t finite, and Tony sits in a series of personal lockdowns, intoning name after name, continuing to know he was in love with an increasingly nameless woman, and strangely, he knew, even more, that she loved him, despite the fact she called the tiny man whom I at least know as Tony in tones of derision by quite another name, without her needing a list available for redaction bit by bit till she reached his real name, as she must. But one comfort prevailed for him whatever she happened to call him and that was the knowledge that his sweet Cruella truly loved the nameless Tony as the bravest Teeny Weeny in the world.