A letter, in case you're reading this (I've made the font size bigger for you)

You said, “There is a time and place for everything.”

Already this ‘you said’ sounds false, a way of creating a distance from you when your actual voice was always close by. When your spoken words, however plain, were real in comparison to the ghostly memory-voice. Moocha phoned and the way he abruptly and half-quizzically says ‘yes’ at the end of his sentences reminds me of you.

Did you even really say that? What if my memory fades, falsifies? How many false notes before it becomes a different tune? Or is that just another way of living: through stray words, images, the things you once held or wore?

I half expected to see you cleaning the kitchen when I woke up. In the park I catch myself looking for you.

What a mystery. Today I thought, for some reason, of the moment you were born, how you must have played as a kid. And this I remember clearly because the image is deeply lodged in my memory. Do only jokes and tears remain after all? You had dressed up as a fakir and, as a lark, went about with your friend collecting money, from street to street. You went to your own house and even nearly got some money from your poor old mother. But at the last moment she recognised you and then beat you proper!

What a mystery. A bird flying through one window and out the other. Is that it, then, the time and place? But you would never have settled for such an ascetic view, never held it to be the whole truth. It is true-and I have to agree with you here- that life on earth will always have some kind of imperfection and that it will never be complete. But that’s only the half of it for there is so much wonder in life.

I think you would have liked this:


"In an orchard there should be enough to eat, enough to lay up, enough to be stolen and enough to rot upon the ground."

I know you would have appropriated it and pretended they were your own words!

Nothing happens all day. Some letters are still arriving for you. I hate to think what will happen when they dry up. Well, what time would you call this now? I think you’d have been amazed yourself to see it. But even this no-time you would have passed through, worked out. Even this rotten time is part of the whole of time you would say and that it has its place. But more than anything you would have shielded me from it, negated the negation, and let time flow again for me.

It won’t last. Everything must fade. Perhaps even our memories.

Maybe that’s true. Let’s see. Right now, all I can say is that I know that nothing lasts forever, but I will always love you.