interlude – a dream

remembering forward

There is a light I have spent my whole life walking back into. It comes late in the afternoon, in the last slow hour before the sun lets go of the day, and it thickens the air to honey, so that the dust turns over in it without falling and the whole room seems to hold its breath and remember itself. I am seven years old inside this light. I am sitting on the cool tiles of the kitchen floor with the warmth of it laid against the side of my face like a hand, and I am doing the secret work of childhood, the thing we do when we are certain no one is watching: I am building the rest of my life. From down here I can see all of it. I will be tall, and I will be brave, and the people moving and murmuring in the other rooms of this house will go on moving and murmuring in it forever. There is a man up ahead of me in the warm distance who has already become everything I am only beginning to be — he has my hands and my mother's eyes and a life I cannot quite make out but can feel the whole shape of — and the only thing standing between us is time, which is a kind of weather I am fairly sure happens to other people. The light is full of him. The light is full of a future so near and so certain that I lift my hand from the floor to touch it.

And the hand that reaches does not come back empty, though it will take me the better part of a lifetime to notice what it has been holding. Because the light does not stay in that kitchen. It follows me, the way light does in dreams, leading me out of one room and setting me down in another, and it takes me now to the end of a long summer street, to a low brick wall where I am eleven years old and a girl I love without ever once using the word is balanced on the bricks beside me, the two of us watching the day burn itself down to copper over the rooftops. We are not saying anything that matters. We are throwing stones at a street sign and missing. But beneath the ordinary surface of the afternoon there runs a certainty so deep that neither of us would think to say it aloud — that we will know each other always, that there will be some version of this wall and this hour and this easy silence at every age we are ever going to be, that certain people are simply given to you for the whole length of a life. A stone finally strikes the sign. The light goes redder. And neither of us has the faintest idea that we are already, even then, sitting there in the warmth, quietly beginning to become strangers.

The same light is waiting in the window of a rented room some years on, where I am sixteen and furious and luminous with plans, watching it pour itself in long bars across a city I have every intention of taking — certain, the way you are only ever certain at sixteen, that the future is a country with my name already inked at the border, that I have merely to grow tall enough to walk in and claim it. And it is there again on an afternoon whose value I will not understand until it is long past saving, when I am lying tangled and unhurried in a bed with someone whose breathing I have learned by heart, and the slow honeyed light moves across the ceiling above us while we lay our two futures down end to end and discover, half-laughing, that together they reach all the way to the far edge of our lives. We name the children there in the warmth as though naming were the same as having. We furnish a whole house out of nothing but wanting it. We promise each other an old age in the dark, the grey hair and the soft forgetful years and the hand held at the very end, as though any of it were ours to give. The light pools in all of these rooms at once, and in the dream I am sitting in I find I can move between them without ever rising from the floor, and somewhere in the drifting I begin to lose track of which warmth came first.

And then — this is the part of the dream where the air changes, where the gold draws out long and goes red at its edges the way it does in the last minutes before it fails altogether — I understand that I am the only one still sitting in these rooms. The city took someone else's name. The breathing I learned by heart is being breathed somewhere I am not, beneath a different ceiling, by a chest that rises now for someone else. The children we named so easily were never born, and so can never die, and I miss them with a grief that has no funeral and no permission anywhere on earth, the particular and unspeakable ache of mourning people who have only ever existed in the part of me that made them. I had grown old with that person — I remember it, I remember the whole unspent length of it, the arguments worn soft with the years, the grey coming in at the temples, the exact weight of the hand I would have held at the very end — every hour of it perfectly clear and not one single hour of it real. The girl on the wall is a woman I would not recognise on the street, and would not stop for if I did. And the man up ahead with my hands and my mother's eyes, the one waiting all that time in the warm distance — he did not arrive either. Somewhere along the road he was quietly set down and I was lifted up in his place, and the exchange was so gentle and so complete that no one ever thought to tell the boy on the kitchen floor, who is still down there, even now, in the first and purest of the light, lifting his small hand to a future he can almost touch.

It was here, in the long reddening of the light, that I finally understood the thing I had been getting wrong for the whole of my life. I had always believed that to remember was to travel backward — that the past was a real place behind me where all these lost things were being kept, and that the ache I called nostalgia was simply the distance between here and there made into a feeling. But there is no there. The mind keeps no room at the back of the house where the past sits intact and waiting; every single time I go searching for the boy in the kitchen I am not finding him at all but making him, here, now, out of a few bright surviving fragments, with the very same hands I use to build the stranger I will be tomorrow. The faculty that remembers and the faculty that dreams are not two faculties. They are one turning thing — a single lantern that throws its light in whichever direction I choose to face it, and the past and the future are only the two walls it happens to fall upon. Which means that my nostalgia was never, not once, grief for what lay behind me. It was grief for what lies ahead and will not come. It was homesickness, the whole time, for a tomorrow. We do not weep for the places we have left. We weep for the ones we were promised, the ones we stood close enough to see in all their detail, before the road bent without warning and carried them out of view.

For a long while I let that be the end of the matter, and I grieved forward instead of back, which is a stranger sorrow than the ordinary kind, and a truer one. But a lantern, I have slowly come to see, is not a grief. A lantern is the thing you use to find your footing in the dark. The same turning light that aches over the tomorrows that never came is the only instrument I have ever been given for making the ones that still might — it is the part of me that gathers up the rubble of everything spent and broken and assembles from it, patiently, a door. I had only been holding it the wrong way round. I had let it hang behind me all this time, pouring its warmth uselessly over rooms I can no longer enter, when it was always free to turn. So I turn it. Here, in the last of the light, with my back at last to the long red hour and my face toward whatever remains, I let it fall forward — and the strange thing, the thing I had not allowed myself to expect, is that the dark up ahead is not empty. There is a shape moving in it. There is always a shape moving in it. The faculty that built the man with my hands has not stopped building, and it has not yet run out of futures, and it never will, until the one night that I do.

There is a light I have spent my whole life walking back into. I know now that I was never walking back. The boy on the kitchen floor was never behind me and was never the past; he was only ever doing the very thing I am doing in this reddening room — sitting still in the present with the warmth on his face, lifting his hand to a future he could almost touch. We have the same hands, he and I, for the simple reason that they are the same hands. The single difference between us was only ever which direction we each mistook for home: he was sure the future was a country he was being carried gently toward, and I spent the better half of my life just as sure it was one I had been carried away from — and we were both of us wrong, and wrong in precisely the same direction, because the future was never a place at all. It is the thing we are each of us always making, out of whatever light we happen to be sitting in. So he is not gone. He was never even behind me. He is here, at the very front of me, facing forward into the warm and falling dark — and if I hold the lantern very still and do not breathe, I can feel him there beside me in the last of the gold, still imagining, and past the two of us, dim and certain and not yet born, someone neither of us has met, lifting a small hand of his own, so sure of what is coming that he can almost reach out and put his fingers on it.