Chapter Two — — The List He Never Wrote

Chapter Two

The List He Never Wrote

He had never written it down. The losses. He was not a person who wrote things down in the confessional sense — not a journal keeper, not a man who converted his interior into documents and stored them somewhere. He kept the losses inside, which meant they kept him inside them, which was perhaps the arrangement he had decided, somewhere below the level of conscious decision, that he deserved.

Three. There had been three of them. Three losses that were also, in the cases that mattered most, his own failures — failures of nerve, of timing, of the simple human ability to say the true thing out loud when saying it mattered and the window was open and the person was there and the saying would have changed everything.

Three. The word sat in his chest like a stone that had been there so long it had stopped feeling like a foreign object.

The first was Zara. Class eight, class nine, the board switch, the years. The first love — if love is the right word for what a fourteen-year-old carries inside him like something he has no container for, something too large for all the available containers.

The second was Nida. Two days. The story of Nida was two days long and the regret of it was much longer, which was its particular, painful economy.

The third was Hana. The third was the one that sat heaviest. The one he could not think about fully without arriving at the specific, recurring image of her face the last time he had seen it — not angry, which would have been easier, but something worse. The look of a person who had fought for a thing and watched the thing she was fighting for walk away from the field.

He thought: I am sitting by a window with cold tea and three names that will not leave me alone. I am the man who always had the right feeling and the wrong timing. I am the man who practiced the sentence and swallowed it. I am the man who ran from the last war and has been wondering ever since why he ran, and what might have been if he hadn't.

He set down the cup. He looked at the wall again.

He thought: perhaps it is time to actually look at it. The whole of it, from the pencil to the running. Perhaps the looking is overdue by approximately several years.

He did not move from the window. But something in him shifted — the particular internal shift of a person who has been circling something for a long time and has finally decided, not with drama but with a quiet exhausted resolution, to stop circling and face it.