Talk

I don’t know who I am, he says, hours before leaving. We have talked with this same honesty our entire lives and the day is gone and the lights of the buses fill the windows with a different colour. Nowhere is home. He doesn’t feel it anywhere: that sense of settled returning, the sediment of a river finding its way to the bottom. The exotic has been calling, and he has always answered, but now there is absence where there should be a place, an image, an idea of a future that offers rest. It’s natural to be divided, I say, though the words offer no help. He still feels weird and, as the silence begins to stretch out, his division creeps into me. Tomorrow he will disappear again, become unseen to my eyes at least. Perhaps this is what I feel in that temporary silence, what he feels in it too: the person he is in this time will be completely gone, unrecoverable, when he leaves. The present is forever being lost to the past, only it is clearer to him because his landscapes are always changing.