One afternoon, another. Any one was any other, they were all equally exchangable. And wasn’t that true of us, too? Weren’t we exchangable, infinitely exchangable, weighing nothing at all, swarming in the summer like midges? We were the same, each of us exactly the same. If one of us disappeared, another would come. We were replaceable, and this was our solace. We were anyone at all, and this was happiness.
How long ago was it now? Ten years and more than ten. But I wasn’t any younger then. I can’t say I lived through those times. I didn’t understand what happened. I didn’t know, how could I know? I was barely there. And you – were you there? What did we see in one another, then when we were no one at all? What was there to recognise? Only that, perhaps, only our looking like anyone else, like everyone else. I’ve never been so anonymous. Never fallen so far beneath my own name.
Later on, you sent me some letters. A few, not many. I lost them a long time ago. I must have thrown them away. I couldn’t keep them. Couldn’t bear that they lay face up in a drawer, the words staring upward. I neglected them, I remember that. They dwere lost among piles of newspapers. One had a coffee stain. A brown ring over the blue, faintly lined paper and the words. It didn’t seem to matter to me. It seemed in keeping with what you wrote.
I don’t think you said much. I mean, there wasn’t much to read. Hadn’t you told me everything already? Hadn’t you told me about your life in those long, interchangable afternoons? I remember the cafe, pots of tea. We took the sun. We spoke. You told me … what? About your life, the whole of your life. And I think I told you about mine.
How easy it was to sum up! It seemed to roll on far above me, my life. I wasn’t living it. Someone else was living it. Someone who lived in my place, far from me. And I was content, content to be lived rather than live. And you? How did I find you, in those near-identical afternoons? How among the cafe goers who looked exactly the same? Someone was living your life, too, you told me. Someone was living in your place; you’d given up. And that was your happiness, that giving up.
They came later, those letters. We’d broken up, hadn’t we? We didn’t see each other anymore. What happened? When was the break? I’d gone back to work, I think. I’d started to work again; I was rising. I was working my way back into my life. I wanted it again. Wanted to live and in my own name, equal to it. And you, what of you? You fell away from me. You fell – but was it only because I was rising? Or was it that you were disappearing into a deeper current, that you’d found a falling below our falling, a deeper nothingness, a deeper anonymity?
I couldn’t follow you there, I remember that. And I couldn’t stay with you there, in those afternoons, those interchangable afternoons, I remember that. What else could we do but break up? It was late summer, wasn’t it? Late summer passing into autumn. After a few weeks – one letter, then another. Then a few more.
Did I reply? Only to say little. Only to acknowledge your words, nothing more. To acknowledge them, as though only to repeat them back to you. To echo them, to amplify them, as though I were only a space for your words to resound. A few letters, handwritten, on blue, faintly lined paper. Envelopes addressed to me, with my name on the front, my address, and these letters, that seemed hardly concerned with me, that moved towards me only to move away.
They had nothing to do with me, I thought then. They were reaching towards what they could not reach, for I was not there where they wanted to find me. I had already left that place, that non-place. What did they say? Nothing, nothing at all. Nothing, nothingness, but by way of a few details, some pieces of news that concerned us and the people we knew.
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