Erasure

Chance must be allowed to play because no one wants to force the issue; neither of us is to act or be acted upon. Chance: we may meet again; we may not; it will happen or will not. From what strange coincidences is our relationship made and unmade.

The field of chance is the day, the everyday. Will we meet there? Will we fail to meet? I know I cannot phone you; that would be too active, and too demanding. Do not force events. But it’s been eighteen months. How old am I? Twenty, twenty-one? It’s been too much of my life.

Then – one day – we met by chance. There you were, with your mother. And if we hadn’t met then? I wouldn’t know you now. And if I hadn’t ran into you in the stationers? For a long time, I would sit in town on a step by the street, waiting, or cycle through the park where we had once walked.

No appointment had been made. Was it that I believed you would appear because it was what I wanted? Rather, I think I liked that belief, that it grew around me like an arbour. Somewhere, in those eighteen months, I was being looked for. Somewhere, as from a far corner of the universe, chance had set out to find me.

How else to pass my summer, except by watching for your return? But you did not appear; and the whole world shaped itself around your absence. I think it was that when I knew the thickness of the everyday, its blindess, its indifference. Fate had no place here. The great rivers of history ran out here; everything was neutralised, and if this was the end, it was the endless end, when nothing was to happen.

But, I met you, didn’t I? Chance came to find me, and when I wasn’t expecting it. I had waited until I’d forgotten I was waiting. When I saw you I knew what my life had been. But it would have been more perfect still if you had failed to see me – failed to remember who I was, as the Abbess had forgotten Honda in the last book of The Sea of Fertility, or the grandmother her own grandson in Tarkovsky’s Mirror?

I would have been found, but by whom? You had forgotten me, and my life had become lighter by that forgetting.

I’m growing older, I know it, as day lies down upon day. Older, and the days that turn will one day do so without me. The earth turns into the sun as it will turn into darkness; this, the long afternoon of my life, will fan out to its evening, like a river that fans into a delta as it reaches the sea.

Sometimes I dream life is already over, and I am living backwards, not forwards, opening doors into rooms in which I’ve been before. Is there a way of watching your own traces disappear from the world, like footprints in snow? One day I will arrive at the point where I am not yet born. Perfection: the work of erasure done, it will be time to pass from my life.