✦ AUGHTY ✦ Out of Order 27 THE PUZZLE DROP, BRIEFLY. AUGHTY Pieces jump out, fitting in one best way. Sometimes multiple. As a triple college dropout, I never learned "how it's done" — so I'm free of it. I just see which pieces fit. I get to choose the story. All the pieces are there. In no particular order. THE OTHER SIDE OF THAT. Think of it like drawing a picture versus reading an essay. In a picture, everything is visible at once. The order of strokes does not change what you see. In an essay, order is the whole thing. What comes first determines what the next sentence means. My mind defaults to picture-mode. Each event happened. Nobody was first. A SPOUSAL ARGUMENT. AUGHTY but I only said that after you said — SHE No. You said it FIRST. The order matters. Who said what, when, in response to what. I cannot tell you. I never encoded it. WHAT I CAN TELL YOU. The total volume of what was said. What each thing triggered in me. Which lines were spikes and which were flat. That checksum is all I have to work with. AUGHTY So we record arguments now. She can replay them — that dimension she has, I don't. She isn't correcting my memory. She is accessing a dimension that was never encoded in mine in the first place. The puzzle drop is the gift. The missing time-axis is the cost. You get one with the other. Same shape. Different face. It's not that I forgot. It's that clock-time was not in the file.