Chapter Seventeen: The Year That Did Not End

Chapter Seventeen: The Year That Did Not End

The second year of college passed. I completed it. The grades were fine. Those three sentences contain the whole of what the exterior knew about that year. They are accurate. They are also the least true description I can offer of what the year actually was, which was: a sustained exercise in the maintenance of function in the presence of progressive interior erosion. I want to be careful with the word erosion. I am not describing a collapse. Collapses are dramatic and visible and people notice and systems mobilize. What I am describing is quieter. It is the slow wearing-away of a surface that looks intact from a distance. The surface holds. The surface produces acceptable results. The surface maintains its relationships, attends its obligations, answers when called. The interior is a different story. The interior has begun to ask questions that have no answers, and to ask them on a repeating loop, and to find that the absence of answers does not stop the asking, because the questions are not actually looking for answers — they are symptoms, and symptoms do not require resolution, they require recognition, and the recognition is the part that is missing. I did not know this then. I know it now with the retrospective clarity that is the only kind of clarity most learning produces. *** There was an afternoon in the second year when something almost broke through.

I was walking home from college — a walk I had taken hundreds of times, the same route, the same visual inventory of the same buildings and the same vendors and the same particular quality of afternoon light that Karachi produces in that hour when the heat is still present but beginning to concede. I was walking and I was not thinking about anything in particular, and in the not-thinking, something surfaced. It was not a thought. It was a feeling with a shape. The shape was: grief. Not sadness, which is the diluted word people use. Grief, which is specific, which has an object. I was grieving something. I was walking home from college in the ordinary afternoon light and I was grieving something and I had not, until that moment of surface, known that I was doing it. I stopped walking. I was in the middle of a block, not near a corner, not near anything in particular. There were people around me — there are always people around you in Karachi, the city does not allow solitude, it only allows privacy, which is a different thing. I stood in the middle of the pavement and let the feeling have its full weight for perhaps ten seconds. Then someone walked into me from behind and said sorry and moved on, and the city reasserted itself, and I walked home. But the grief had been there. I had felt it clearly. It had an object, and the object was everything I had set in motion and let run and cut loose and ended by phone from hotel rooms. It was not all regret — I want to be precise. It was the grief of having moved through things at a speed that did not permit the full experience of them. The grief of the tourist who has seen the painting but cannot remember stopping in front of it.

I had been a tourist in my own life. This was not the most comfortable thing I had ever understood about myself.