The Road Not Taken

I have a cloister here. The honey-coloured wood panelling frames me in a distant cradle of light and shadow, like the petals of some enormous blossom. I am cradled to sleep in it sometimes, I hear the diffused echoes of the distant possibilities thunder faintly through my cloister walls. On rare cold nights, I know she knows, and she knows it too – that we are all human and think of what might have been and what might not.

And so, innocent of deliberate intent or malignancy, I remember the other one. It is on the edge of the penumbra, the interface between daydream and nightdream, that I see her barely unforgotten face, white and grey against the velvet backdrop of sleep.

She was a dancer. I told her she was like a gazelle. Some people are always uncomfortable with long limbs, and yet show nothing to be uncomfortable about. We shared few meals, few moments, and our distances were greater than our proximities. And one fine evening, we suddenly realised that we had stepped completely through the minefield of our overlapping fires and into the safe zone.

We are friends, and that is all; even though I sometimes wonder as I reach into the darkness with the last of my thoughts, I know I will not grasp anything but that. It is awkward for the young to think of affection without desire; it is impossible for one to exist without some form of the other. But it is entirely possible for two people one day to have the first without the second.

I know this to be true.