“So what you’re saying is,” she began again, only to trail off into wordlessness once more.


“What I’m saying is that you have a false perception of reality.”


“I see,” she said with a continuous nodding motion of her head. But I knew she did not ‘see’ anything, let alone understand what I was trying to tell her. I sighed agitatedly.


“How many ways could I possibly say this?” I mumbled to myself before going back to normal speaking volume, directing my words at her. “You struggle with the task of separating real from not real, truth from illusion.


“It’s not exactly simple, you see,” I continued, mostly talking to myself now that I had long lost hope of getting through to her. “It is the job of illusion to trick. If it were easy to determine its falseness, it would not be doing its job.”


She just kept on nodding her head, eyes wide and unbelieving. Clearly, she was thinking of my unnaturally high level of insanity. But of course, that was only her perception of me. Insanity does certainly not live here, in my mind. She only thought it did.


“Think of time,” I told her, thinking that maybe an example would get through to her. Quite foolish, in retrospect.


“What about it?” The girl prompted impatiently.


“That’s where I was heading. You see, the concept of time is created by humans. It does not actually exist the same way for everyone. My time is different than your time. There seems to be past, present, future. But is there really? And if there is such a thing as the future, why are we always moving towards it?”


“Because the past has already happened and we can’t stay in the present forever,” she countered, looking quite proud of herself.


“But why?” I asked, catching her off-guard as she tripped and stuttered over her incoherent half-formed words.


“Take Rene Magritte,” I started up again, never giving her a chance to stop me. “His work, The Treachery of Images, a portrayal of a pipe with the statement, Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Genius.”


“I’m sorry,” she said helplessly. “I’m not following.”


“And I’m not surprised. It’s not truly a pipe, rather a painting that happens to look like one.”


“But it doesn’t just happen to look like one,” she protested. “It does look like one.”


“You may think so,” I allowed. “I may think so. But it still does not make it an actuality.”


“So it’s an illusion?” She guessed, believing she had finally caught on.


“Ah, m’dear, isn’t everything?”