Another Day

The morning slips beneath the curtain before I have consented to exist. It is not light that wakens me but the pressure of being expected somewhere, by someone who does not know me and therefore cannot know that I have almost disappeared during the night. Every morning I gather myself as children gather shells left by the tide, wondering whether these scattered fragments shored against my ruins belong together at all. There is a hand upon the washstand. It is my hand. There is a face in the mirror. It inclines when I incline, yet I distrust its obedience. The water climbs over my wrists and I think, if I remained beneath it long enough, perhaps I should become transparent, merely another current flowing among currents. I examine my wrists. Every day I take a morning bath, I wet my hair. Wrap a towel around me as I’m heading for the bedroom chair.

The room keeps no account of me. The chair receives my dress; the window receives the pale sky; the floorboards, worn smooth by innumerable footsteps, make no distinction between mine and those of the women who lived here before me or who will live here after, fastening buttons before the same vacillating mirror, pausing at the same hesitant window with the same unharnessed reluctance to descend into the streets where every face seems finished while mine is always in the act of dissolving in a jar by the door.

To go out is to agree, for a little while, to wear an outline. The city accepts this compromise. It requires only that one move with sufficient purpose to resemble the others. How curiously complete they appear, each intently staring into a glass rectangle while they walk, each lifting a hat or turning a corner with the confidence of those whose names fit them as bark fits a tree. I move among them like the shadow of a gull crossing water. No one looks up.

There are rooms in which paper accumulates as leaves accumulate in autumn, quietly, without astonishment, until one imagines that the true harvest of civilization is not fruit but documents. Keyboards clatter. Cups cool. Voices rise and subside like the sea heard through closed windows. I answer when spoken to. My words travel outward. They do not return. They become part of the general murmur, indistinguishable from the tapping of keys or the settling of dust in the shafts of afternoon light. Yet once — only once — the rim of a porcelain cup catches the sun, and for an instant the whole room hangs suspended in a brilliance so delicate that I think: this is enough; this single radiant glimmer has justified the labour of remaining visible.

But already it has gone.

There are evenings when I sit so still that the room persuades itself I have become another piece of its furniture, another shadow cast by the lamp, and I think that perhaps loneliness is not emptiness at all but a kind of enchantment by which one is slowly turned into the silence one inhabits. Sometimes a footstep upon the stair comes and breaks the spell. A knock; the turning of a key; another presence enters, bringing with it not merely a voice or a pair of hands like a lizard on a windowpane but an alteration in the very proportion of things, so that the air itself seems lighter, as though the walls had withdrawn a little to make room for hope.

“Remain,” I think, though I scarcely dare give the thought words, because words harden wishes into things that may be refused. Remain until morning; remain until the room forgets it was ever empty. Yet morning is always more faithful to departure than to desire. He rises while the light is still uncertain, carrying away with him nothing visible, and yet when the door has closed the whole apartment seems subtly diminished, as though some invisible tide had withdrawn from it, leaving only the familiar furniture and the chair and the cup upon the table, all exactly as before and yet altered beyond repair. I wonder whether sorrow is made not from absence but from those brief moments in which one has almost believed oneself delivered from it, only to discover that hope, too, leaves quietly, closing the door with quisling gentleness.

Sometimes I imagine another presence — not a rescuer, for I have ceased believing that one consciousness can rescue another, but a companion whose silence might run beside mine as two rivers, distinct yet moving toward the same sea. There are evenings when such a figure almost exists. A coat over the back of a chair. Laughter that startles the room into believing itself inhabited. The peculiar warmth left in the air after another body has departed from it. Absence is immeasurably more skilful than presence. It enters without opening the door. It arranges the cushions, extinguishes the lamp, teaches the room again its native language. Yesterday, upon the stair, I saw a man who wasn’t there.

And still I cannot say that I am alone.

There are voices which continue after speech has ended, as the sea continues inside the shell. Bernard shaping the world with stories. Neville pursuing perfection as though it might consent to love him. Jinny entering every room like sunlight upon rectangles of polished glass. Susan with the earth beneath her nails. Louis listening always for the sound of exclusion. They move within me as waves move beneath the surface of the sea, distinct for an instant where they crest, then surrendering themselves to one another until no boundary remains. I myself am such a crest.

The waves fall; withdraw and fall again, like the thud of a great beast stamping.

Evening gathers the city into itself. Windows kindle one by one until the streets seem bordered by small, wavering certainties, each enclosing a life that appears complete from outside and is no less uncertain than my own. The day folds itself away without conclusion. Nothing has happened that history would trouble to remember. Yet everything has happened: the light altered upon a wall; a stranger smiled without intention; rain darkened the stone; a pigeon rose suddenly into the air; I heard a racket in the hall and I thought I heard a fall but I never opened up my door; and through these slight disturbances the invisible fabric of existence has been rewoven once more.

Tomorrow the sea will cast me ashore again.

I shall gather the fragments, fit the face to the mirror, the hand to the sleeve, the name to the voice. I shall walk once more among the completed people, carrying within me the secret suspicion that we are all rising for a moment into separateness because the light has touched us there, before falling back into the vastness from which no one, not even the self, can finally be distinguished. Slipping into stockings, stepping into shoes, dipping in the pocket of my raincoat, it’s just another day.