Curved as your nails are, from being shut in a door

You have tried to talk to you six times, and six times you have failed. The first time, you mutter I’ve got to remember, got to remember… hoping that the echo of sound through your own bones will lodge somewhere, the temporal bone, or perhaps the incus. The words stick in your head and ear but block them up as wax: what goes ‘in one ear’ in fact originates on the inside, has no reason to proceed outwards, or to pass through to the brain where it could be more securely stored.

I don’t know what you are trying to recall, father, as you stand there, assembling computer parts, resetting micro-switches on an already-dusty motherboard. You’ve just purchased a new slew of electronics, and hovering over them, a near-sighted tinker, you fret over instructions commuted from paper to brain cells, a manual you have repeated enough times to know by heart, but now misplaced twice: the book is gone, its contents also missing.

The computer will tell time, and so I reason you are a watchmaker. What time will tell you I am not sure: you have hidden the secrets of your head in strange pockets, places where even you, a manipulator of tiny gears, may not be able to fit your fingers, regardless of the strange places those arcing digits have explored.