Even the Losers

Because there are, whether we admit it in those lean years when we still imagine tomorrow to be an inexhaustible country or only afterward when tomorrow has dwindled into the immured province of recollection, certain quixotic evenings that refuse the common obedience owed to time itself, refusing to sink into that anonymous reservoir where so many days, equally bright while they were being lived and equally forgotten once they have surrendered their brief tenancy of the earth, disappear without even the courtesy of an echo, but instead continue, with a persistence almost geological in its patience and therefore almost divine in its indifference to the wishes of those who would either preserve or escape them, to exist not behind us but somewhere alongside us, as though the soul, unable to endure the singular direction in which clocks insist existence must proceed, had fashioned for itself another chronology wherein what has been lost is not dead but merely waiting with the inexhaustible composure of the stars, which themselves possess no memory and therefore no regret, though men, who have mistaken regret for memory since the beginning of speech, continue to lift their faces toward them as though light that has travelled centuries could somehow answer a preternatural question born only yesterday.

Well, it was nearly summer. We sat on your roof.

And maybe it was never the evening itself, nor the weather balanced upon that invisible threshold where spring, reluctant to surrender its gentleness, already hears the approaching footsteps of summer before any leaf has confessed it, nor even the two figures elevated for a little while above the sleeping architecture of ordinary lives, believing altitude to be the same thing as perspective because youth has not yet learned that one may overlook an entire town and still remain blind to the next parlous vagary of one’s own existence, but rather the illusion — which is not false merely because it cannot endure, any more than dawn is false because noon inevitably follows — that another consciousness had, for one immeasurable interval whose duration could never afterward be calculated except by the magnitude of its absence, consented to inhabit the same silence, so that words themselves became unnecessary not because there was nothing to say but because language, that old and faithful servant forever arriving one heartbeat too late, found itself dismissed before mysteries it had never been fashioned to contain.

Yeah, we smoked cigarettes and we stared at the moon.

For it is not love, or not only the tang of love, that afterward compels the endless return, but the intolerable suspicion that somewhere, hidden among the soft creak of ceiling fans and gestures too slight to have attracted notice while they were being performed, lay the single unnoticed hinge upon which entire destinies, with that economy so characteristic of fate that delights in disguising catastrophe as coincidence, quietly turned: not the embrace remembered because it was an embrace, nor the promise because promises are born already carrying within themselves the slow contagion of their own impossibility, but possibly the moment between one breath and the next when neither soul, precisely because each believed itself securely accompanied, imagined that solitude had already begun its patient journey toward them from a distance so immense that it appeared, like the first faint star of evening in the sloping concavity of eternity, less an arrival than something that had always been there awaiting only the proper angle from which to become visible.

And I showed you stars you never could see.

Thus the years, which men flatter themselves by calling experience as though accumulation were the same thing as understanding, gather not into certainty but into strata through which memory, labouring like water descending into ancient limestone, dissolves one hardness only to discover beneath it another harder still, until the past ceases to resemble the life that was lived and becomes instead the life endlessly interpreted, revised, contradicted, forgiven, accused and forgiven again, each recollection altering not the event — which remains beyond amendment with the terrible innocence possessed by all completed things — but the one who remembers, so that the youth who once believed himself the author of his own happiness survives only as a character continually rewritten by the older witness who cannot decide whether to envy him for his magnificent ignorance or mourn him for possessing, without ever recognizing its cost until it had already departed, that absolute confidence by which the heart entrusts itself to another without requiring evidence, precedent, guarantee or even probability.

Babe, it couldn’t have been that easy to forget about me.

And therefore one comes at last — not to peace, for peace belongs perhaps only to those whose memories have become mercifully indistinct, nor even to resignation, which is often hope exhausted rather than transformed — but to something quieter and infinitely stranger, namely the recognition that those whom fortune appeared to overlook, those whose names were never called when choosing sides for basketball, who walked away carrying no trophies except an obscure fidelity to moments no tribunal of history would ever record, were not impoverished by their brief possession of complaisant joy merely because it was brief, since duration has never been the proper measure of grace, and that whatever obscure dignity survives the erosions of disappointment survives precisely because somewhere, beyond every explanation subsequently invented and every sorrow patiently rehearsed until it acquired the appearance of wisdom, there remains one ungovernable certainty, one ultimate guerdon, which reason, age, irony, and even grief itself cannot wholly extinguish: that for one evening beneath an immeasurable heaven indifferent enough to be eternal, two finite creatures believed, without calculation and therefore without defence, that the distance separating one soul from another had been crossed, and although the crossing could not be maintained, although time reclaimed it with the tireless authority by which rivers reclaim every footprint left upon their banks, the passage itself, because it happened once, continues to cast across all that followed a light less brilliant than enduring, less visible than indispensable, by which even now the traveller, long after the road has vanished into darkness, still discovers enough of the next step to continue walking, because yeah, you could kiss like fire and you made me feel like every word you said was meant to be.

Even the losers get lucky sometimes.