“Try shrinking your ego and expanding your brain!” she yelled.
“Eh? I got a distinction in Physics and a scholarship for my masters…and you’re telling me to expand my brain?”
She marched out and slammed the door so hard that I thought the cottage would crumble to the ground. An image rushed to my head of a cartoon house all collapsed, apart from the door.
It wasn’t that we hated each other; we were just going through a rough patch. I thought that getting away for awhile would help. But whenever I suggested anything interesting, she’d cut it down like a tree. Crash it would go, my big idea, felled and without hope of rising again. The same went for my communication skills. Whenever I tried to express myself – even when I wasn’t being sarcastic – she’d say, Stop being so sarcastic! Or she’d accuse me of using clichés. Christ, she had no idea how painful it was. The words were there, forming in my brain, but they couldn’t get out. Something had gone haywire in the signal from the head to the mouth. Something had short-circuited