Novel

As the novel begins, we are impatient for the mistakes we expect him to make. What he will do when the phone rings, his estranged son on the far end repeating his name like a plea. He finally succumbs—we are meant to believe he had it in him all along—and the voice will carry him to a distant place within himself where love is possible. Before he arrives, he will resist, resentful; he must overturn, predictably, that age-old failure to forgive.

This is how the story must sail. A confined perception, an emotion held underwater for too long. His mistake. One that affects change, retrieves his anchor, unties the boat of his shortening life, and nudges it from the harbour.

This is what sustains us, that is, if it is enough for a time to penetrate moments not our own, to find regretfully familiar the hero’s limited vision, his isolation mirrored in the dim, unsung corners of our lives. By the time the novel is almost over, the revelation should not be easy. Even if the truth remains, that there is no truth, this too, is insight. In any case, clarity waits. An unwavering queue of errors to the day he blinks and every cloud has gone up in smoke like the years he has wasted, dissolving into rain.

And what about us? Have we made all the blunders we were supposed to make in this story that we did not write, but which had written itself to the moment that we stood before the door to our new home, in disbelief? Did a part of us believe, perhaps, that we deserved this? Our reward: an untold afterlife of minor trials and nothingness occurring over and over, where the mistakes we commit are no longer lamentable.

Not, I will continue to sleep with strangers so that I may forget myself. Not, If nobody loves me like this, there is no reason to love. We open the door and forget to hold hands. I touch your cheek as compensation. These small retrievals are all we need now. Darling, we have all we need.


(Published in Tinfish)