I started dreading they would show up, become as present in reality as they'd become in my mind. Rather, he would show up because she wasn't really the problem, not at least, the primary cause of it. Afterall, it wasn't she that put in the effort to contact me and let me know what horrible person I must be. Isn't everyone? At the supermarket, the only one in town. At the post office where most conversations were carried out with people I hadn't seen in a month or two. Or even longer. Usually longer as I'd taken to the reclusivity of old age. What is the use of a social construct when all it led to was outbursts like his. There was so much hostility in what he had to say and where it came from appeared to originate in something other than what I had said about a scientific theory that I understood if not completely then at least enough to have substituted it for the failed one everyone else was pushing around like an empty shopping cart at a flea market.