We had our season. This is what i tell myself. We had our season, and it ended. Were you waiting all along to go, poised to leap? It seems to me now that even while I held you clasped in my appalled embrace you were already looking back at me, like one lingering on the brink of your departure, all that you were leaving already fading in your glance, becoming memory even as it stood before you.
Were you part of the plot, a party to it? I would like to know. I think I would like to know. Would we have been left free and undisturbed, let entirely to our own charming devices, as we were, had someone not decided it should be so?
Before such little doors of doubt can open more than a crack my mind jumps up in panic and slams them shut. Yet reason with a scoffing laugh insists that you were in on it, as they say, that you must have been; but what does reason know except itself?
Nowadays I prefer the murk and confusion of the lower brain, the one that used to go by the name of heart. Heart, yes; not a word you will have heard me employ very often up to now. I feel as I have not felt since I was a lovelorn adolescent, at once bereft and lightened, giddy with relief at your going - you were too much for me - and yet assailed by a sorrow so weighty, of so much more consequence than I seem to myself to be, that I stand, no, I kneel before it, speechless in a kind of awe.
Even at those times when, sated with its pain, my mind briefly relinquishes the thought of you the sense of loss does not abate, and I go about mentally patting my pockets and peering absently into the shadowed corners of myself, trying to identify what it is that has been misplaced. This is what it must be like to have a wasting illness, this restlessness, this wearied excitation, this perpetual shiver in the blood.
There are moments - well, I do not wish to melodramatize, but there are moments, at the twin poles of dusk and dawn especially, when I think I might die of the loss of you, might simply forget myself in my anguish and agitation and step blindly off the edge of the earth and be gone for good. And yet at the same time I feel I have never been so vividly alive, so quick with the sense of things, so exposed in the midst of the world's seething play of particles, as if I had been flayed of an exquisitely fine protective skin. The rain falls through me silently, like a shower of neutrinos.
~Athena by John Banville.
