Of late, he had caught himself, only too often, asking her the same questions he had asked and been asked once, long ago. What perfume are you wearing? Where do you go when you want to disappear?

He felt the need to keep notes. Compare them. Place her reactions and the reactions of someone else, long ago, side by side and see how similar, how different they were from each other. There was no way to stop, he knew. Do you realise what high standards we are setting for anybody else?

She had taught him how to love, it was a life skill as far as he was concerned. He wondered sometimes if she had only meant to teach him to love her, what she would think if she heard her own words being used, misused.

It was not guilt that he felt, not really. More a niggling sense of plagiarism. He copied her ways, having known no other. After a point every woman looked the same, faceless, no personality. And yet she was so fallible. It never did appeal to his ordered mind, this capacity for human error. She filled his life, even as he forgot her, with old habits. It was not love, not even its dregs, but the ghost feeling that one has after taking off a watch worn for years together.

The ditty came back to him. Doggerel. Where do words like this come from? So unaesthetic to even an unpretentitous ear.
He had to stop reading, mid sentence, put his book down. He blinked. The feeling went away. He went back to reading. It struck him that the feeling assailed him when his brain was clear. He read away, with more concentration.