The Open Palm

No, there was no ‘teenage angst’, I do not remember that. The escape from the party, the walk to the lake at dawn in the frizzying rain: the world that had been closed opened to us like an opening hand. And we went across the open palm of the world, in the morning, that may as well have been the first morning of the world.

Of what did we speak? Of the others left behind, and, as all those do who are half infatuated, the chance of your meeting, its strangeness, and the kind of imperative it carries. With, not alone: we were always meant to pass here; the world was always meant to open. Now we are alone with the fact of our attraction; it is a fate held in common, and this first of all was the topic of our conversation.

But even this is wrong, for what conversation was there? Intervallic speech, speech that lightened itself in the opening between what is said: how was it that nothing seemed to say itself, or what we said was already undone, and there was the delight of letting those words float into the air and disappear?

What was said did not matter; that it said itself was everything, that, speaking, we were able to exchange the lightness of speech, able to lighten it: we were both smiling, I remember that. Smiling, and because we’d lent speech a kind of assistance. We had left the party; we made our way to the lake: you said you would always remember that.

So did I. But it stands, in my memory, as part a series of days, of nights we shared. A series marked by lightness, by the saying of nothing in particular, where what mattered was the lightness of speech, before what it was that speech bore. True, infatuation fell away, but wasn’t there retained a memory of that first infatuation, a sense of youth, of the morning, and the promise held in the open palm of the world?

Yes, that’s what lightness has always meant: it is youth, it is play of speech that lightens the world. Absolute youth. ‘We never said anything’, you said. Nothing was said, that’s true. But by that nothing was spoken the between of speaking, its its demand, which asked, over the years, to be maintained.

And that’s what held us together. Together? But who were we, speakers, in the exchange of the lightness of speech. No one in particular; no one, everyone, who gave up what they said to the sacrifice speech demands. A gentle sacrifice, a light burning, a flame in the drizzle of that first morning.

What joy there is to give, to be given! Joy of anonymity, of the open palm from which everything must rebegin. That’s what it means to be young, to be very young, and finally for youth to name what cannot be lived, but that streams all around us.

You will not step into the same morning twice. And not even once, for the step is a gift, a giving, that will plunge you into the streaming of youth. To speak is also to come apart.

And after you have spoken? After the morning passed? That morning became the brightness behind everything, a sky behind the sky, the backdrop of our lives, obscured sometimes, sometimes lost, but that burned like the flame in the rain, in the sacrifice to which we were given.