Passage

Outside. Why did our encounter always take place via a movement out and away from others, from the school where we were taught and the houses where we lived? Was it by chance that the night we went to a party, we left at once for the woods? We moved side by side, two bodies in the darkness.

By what chance had we been stranded there, in the suburbs? But they were necessary, those streets, those houses, if we were to move against them – if, that is, they were to fall back as the backdrop of our movement, which allowed it to be escape. And wasn’t it our fortune that that a part of the world had not yet been completely developed – that there were still empty spaces owned by no one in particular upon which houses had not been built?

You were always surprised by them, the open spaces I was able to find. By the fields, and beyond them, the railway bridge, and beyond that the path that descended along a brook to a private road, along which were paddocks where horses were kept. Then the long path to the forestry plantation: I’d found all this by chance, it was my gift to you, and you always said you could not find it without me.

From time to time over the years – how many years have there been – we would meet and pass through the same open spaces. And wasn’t it by way of that passing – unexpectedly opening in suburbia, in the streets full of houses – that we knew one another? Exceptional days! Exceptional nights, on the path, on the private road, in the plantation!

We were the exception, and our friendship exceptional – and wasn’t it so by the distance that did not fail to hold us apart? Friendship by way of distance, the opening of distance. But it was time, too, that was opened thus. Yes, as though distance first had to be thought in terms of a disjunction in time.

The wind was always still when we met, you said. There’s never any wind, you said. Still, that was your word. Yes, always a gap in the weather – no wind, and stillness, and it was as though the day had gathered itself up, that it was paused at the brink of something massive, some vast event. Who knew it but us?

Do you remember, the night of some football victory or another, how they shouted at us when they passed in their cars? The windows rolled down, they shouted, victorious. We had won. And who were we, who had not seen the match? But we had seen other things; a brown moon above a clearing in the plantation, where the foresters had come. Everywhere, tree stumps fresh cut and the brown moon above. That night – I remember – we crossed a golf course. The sprinklers were turning and the path passed between green dunes of grass. Through to the road and the train station, where we’d catch the last train back to town. How did you know we’d get there in time?, you asked; I didn’t know; I gave the decision to fate. Did I think we were blessed?

The exception. What did we have in common? When we with were with the others, we knew we were different to them. Irony – we were among them! Us – among them! And when we were outside, away from then? Solemnity. Silence. We were already outside and away: that was a given. The old world had fallen away, but where was the new world?

We did not talk of the future. Always the threshold, always were we at the threshold. Had we found jobs? We’d work, yes, but these were not yet our jobs. Nothing had begun, not our real lives. What chance was there for us? We were exceptional only for ourselves. You were a dental technician, and what was I? A finder of lost boxes in the warehouse. I cycled one way to work and would pass you cycling the other.

Long gaps would pass – months, years. But this was not a test of friendship; those gaps were part of its movement. Some friends are on close orbit, some on more distant ones. Where are you now, friend, behind the sun? Never mind; time passes but it is unjoined by friendship. Time passes, but it does not touch us, we whom friendship gathers at the threshold.