A long time after Mottsu’s suicide I looked across the room and saw my Statler egg cup peeping from the cupboard. I mean I often looked across the room, not just this day, and with the door ajar I should have glimpsed two egg cups. On this day there was just one egg cup. Statler solo?

Puzzling. Statler without Waldorf. Where was Waldorf?

I’ve searched only to confirm he is missing. I have no memory of losing Waldorf, I can only think he must have leapt from the cupboard, springing into a free-fall, bouncing on the bench, before shattering on the floor. Don’t ask me how I missed that spectacular performance. Don’t ask me why he stepped over the edge, if that’s what my egg cup did.

Statler and Waldorf, curmudgeons maybe, and a pair absolutely. Each only half an act without the other, much like Mottsu and me. In cahoots, each siding with the other, we could poo-poo and rail against popular opinion with the best. We shared outlooks and agreed about what we disagreed with. One rarely laughed without the other chortling too.

Wherever Waldorf went, however Waldorf is now, it is Statler’s welfare that weighs on my heart. I know the loneliness of being one half of a pair and left behind, trying to reconcile with an incomprehensible loss.

Even some years later I am engulfed in abandonment that began with astonishment and subsequently manifests as panic and anxiety on occasions, mostly it’s a resigned dullness.

I’m stricken with lonesomeness.

These days it is me and Statler together, both of us forlorn, alone, and lonesome.
That’s why (in part) I have finally come to writing this down…

“Our woal life is a idear we dint think of nor we dont know what it is. What a way to live.
Thats why I finely come to writing this down. Thinking on what the idear of us myt be. Thinking on that thing whats in us lorn and loan and oansome.” Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker