On the last time you saw your mother (series: notes to myself).
You don’t know, but that was the last time you did it. This is not a point about every event being unique. More like an everyday fact about repetition and last times. You see a friend. Often. Whenever you both wish. But there was a last time. He is no longer. Yet, you did not know. You used to play a game. So many times. But there is a last game that was not to be followed by another. You never went back to that bicycle. The house you have not visited, ever again. The commute that won’t repeat. The last time you were in your home town. The train that you will never catch again. The frying pan you won’t use anymore. The receipt no longer followed.
Repetition is a trick to hide a Heraclitean life. Similarities smear uniqueness. Circularities pretend to invert the flow of the river. It takes gigantic amounts of computation and data to simulate one second of a heartbeat, even partially. Each of them will never repeat, of course. One of them is unlike any other, of course. But we do not mind. We abstract and distract; distract and abstract. And again. And see a stable world of objects and qualities, of raindrops falling repeatedly, all indistinguishable from each other, of events recurring, of lunches and dinners, days and nights, Mondays and Christmases, birthdays and academic years, round routines and reassuring recurrences that end, but start again, monotonously, up and down, like pistons in an engine, like diastole and systole of a bloody flow of Heraclitean time. And every Faustian moment escapes our attention. Until one day we look back and realise, stupidly astonished, that we did play the last match, we never saw that friend again, we no longer have family reunions, the place we used to go no longer exists, the plane tree has been replaced by a street lamp, the car park is now a pedestrian square, the cinema has been turned into a bank. Everything happens only once, of course. But some types of events give us the impression that it is not time to look back, not yet. It will happen again. Once more at least. There will be another chance to repeat. Like getting out of bed. Like the last time I kissed you goodnight.
It’s the breaking of the flow of types and cycles of events that hurts. Because they manage to fool you. You never had a chance to hear the crow’s “never more”, not even once, so you did not pay attention, did not say goodbye meaning it in full, under the skin, all the way to the bones. In your mind, it was just another see you later.
PS The second edition of “Notes to myself” is available as a book on Amazon: https://a.co/d/c0NmO2F
