Memory Lane

“Your Honour, I come bearing receipts, both metaphorical and literal. I catalogue history. I archive presence. And I must report a major anomaly.”

[She pulls out a large, gilded tome titled: The Life of Audun: A Soliloquy in D-Minor.]

“I have read this cover to cover. Do you know what is missing?”

[Flips pages violently.]

“The woman who ghostwrote half his development.”

“She braided his confidence strand by strand, bandaged his bad decisions with better insights, and still—still—he wrote her out. Not as villain. Not as hero. Not even as a cameo.”

“This is not a humble omission. This is intentional erasure. This is ego that edits.”

[She leans forward, glasses gleaming.]

“You do not get to call someone ‘the most important person in your life’ and then redact them like a censored war file.”

“You do not get to take her lessons and her love and her labour and tuck them into footnotes beneath the tales of others.”

“You do not get to plagiarise her presence while pretending it never shaped the narrative.”

[She turns slowly to the jury.]

“Your Honour, ladies, gentlemen, and cryptids of the court—this is not a man with memory loss. This is a man who drafts his autobiography in pencil… and erases the people who made him real when it suits his comfort.”