Q: And do you think this, all this, lasts forever?
A: No, and if it does it should not. Nothing that is this beautiful
should be made to last. Life without death is a tragedy; eternal art not
art at all.
A: Yes, and if it doesn't it should. If even this degrades, decays,
then of what use is hope? I could not bear to live in a world where all
beauty eventually dies, where beauty, indeed, is contingent on
transience.
I get on the train, and you are there, waiting for me. You smile as I
sit down opposite you, and I remember the day we met all those years
ago. The day I met the 99% perfect girl; the day I fell in love; the day
everything started; the day it all started to end.
I knew as soon as I saw you: here is a girl as close to 100% as I'm ever
likely to get. Should I have waited for that 100%, I will never know.
Of course we ended up disappointing each other. No surprise. How could
we not, when we were so afraid of revealing what we want? (What we want
what we really really want.) Somehow we made that 1% out to be so much
more than it really was - it grew and it grew until there was a rift
between us neither of us knew how to bridge. Was it because everything
else was so perfect that we couldn't help but focus on what wasn't?
I look across at you. All I see now is the 99% I overlooked because of the 1%.
How did it happen, when did we grow up all of a sudden? Where was the
line, how did we cross it? Without warning, without fanfare. What a
shame! Do you remember the smell of rain, the whisper of the wind?
Your smile fades. You look out the window. Silence.
But you were always like the moon to me. As you went so did my desire
ebb and flow, as I tried my hardest to keep up with you. But no matter
how hard I tried I never got any closer to you; no matter how hard I try
a part of you will always remain hidden from me.
We speed past the seaside. Oh! That is where we were once, on that
beach, happy. You lay against my chest as you scoop up handfuls of sand
and allow them to run through your fingers. Do you remember? The picnic
mat beneath us, the future before us. We used to talk, once. We used to
love, once.
And beneath our love, our happiness, flowed that steady undercurrent
of sadness. Do you remember how sad we were? Like something that could
only be seen out of the corner of your eyes. Lurking, always, at the
edges of our happiness. It was not loss, no - it was the memory of loss.
That every second I spent with you was another second gone, lost
forever like so much sand in the wind.
Your side profile still turned towards me, I remember the day I went
through your diary. Why, I will never know. And I will never forgive
myself. "And love was a language he never learnt to speak. He had to
pick it up and piece it together wherever he could. And slowly, but
surely, he began to understand. Just the tiniest bits at first, but
slowly, and surely, he began to be fluent in love. But who can say, even
as he was learning to listen, learning to speak, how much had been lost
between the cracks, how much love had flowed past him,
incomprehensible? They say you never step in the same river twice. So
too love. He could not receive the love I gave him, and it will never be
the same again."
Didn't you feel like you were drowning, desperately trying to grab on
to anything that felt real to you? That's what falling in love felt
like to me. Or maybe it was like wandering in a desert. I'm parched,
desperate for a sip of water, and I stumble upon an oasis I'm never sure
is not a mirage. I gulp it all down, hungrily, filling myself to the
point of bursting. Maybe cause I thought it was real; maybe cause I was
afraid it wasn't. When you're at breaking point what do you care about
the difference between reality and illusion anyway?
I turn to look out the window, too. There it was, the scene from the day
we met. I glance back at you but of course you were gone too. What do I
care about the difference between reality and illusion anyway? The
train speeds on; we arrive at our next memory. I think of all the things
I've said, all the things I never said. How could love have turned out
to be the greatest barrier of all?
All the messages we sent each other were the perfectly preserved
records of our imperfect love. Another chance for us to get things wrong
again. Love: the perfect desire for the imperfect. But we confuse the
imperfect object with the perfect and like two trains speeding away in
the night we miss each other by inches, perfectly engineered
imperfection. And we are breathless from the speed, the proximity. We
want to reach out; we dare not.
In the distance, we hear the sound of two trains - a collision.
