'You'll enjoy it when you get there'

The words she dreaded more than anything were, "You're so different from all I had imagined." In fact, words were just wounds and better put to the side. There was nothing to say, nothing left to say. Distance, she thought, was indeed the soul of beauty. Yes, far better to sit at the window and let the clouds gather silently up above and then write at the small table, gathering in your thoughts, making something out of nothing, remaining half-unknown to him and yourself, because that was the best way to see, don't you see..keep the wine in a dark place, see your own face dimly reflected in the shimmering, distant past, some lines formed then still with you, see yourself as a stranger would see you. "I know what distances are," she whispered. 

The great summer sun on your shoulder now remembered after all these years. In winter, fires fragment and the ashes are so soft, indistinguishable. What shape there was to your life was to be found in the gestures of your hands. She observed the ink stains on her fragile fingers. "Yes," she said to herself, "it is just like this". 

In mid-morning, while the world lost its focus, it was best to keep the windows slightly open so the warm air would enter the house and the childlike patterns formed by the lace on the floor would ebb and flow into existence at irregular intervals. With each mirror recalling another time, it was as if, she thought ponderously, that her life was larger than it really was. There were no formal arrangements, but neither were there any signs of visible decay. "The next person in this house," she said to herself, "will wonder what kind of human being used to live here, what kind of life she could possibly have lived."  

Take up your pen again in the last light, and think and write naked, knowing your false self would always fall away in such moments. He's looking over your shoulder. You imagine him looking. Outside, the darkness gathering, the windows turning cold, the wooden furniture coming to its own stillness. Find that one sentence that takes you back. And, when you get back to that place of silence, return and drift back to that old room, alone, as if time didn't matter any more, you'll understand, vaguely, obliquely, brokenly that you'll enjoy it when you get there.