Twist

by Colum McCann

I, too, have known those sorts of days when I have put on the Prufrock smile when really all I had was the remnants of a wrecked life.

Nothing, not even words, can stop the flow of time. Things break. Nobody I talked to ever knew the precise point at which it was triggered.

So much of who we are is who we cannot be. We flatter ourselves when we think we can become something entirely new.

The initial mystery of any journey is not so much where you will end up, but how you got to the starting point at all.

The best way to experience home is to lose it for a while. Then, when it is gone, you can know what it is. You can yearn to return to it. It is a form of wounding. You welcome the scar so it will remind you of where you once were.

The unhappy mind takes a morbid delight in solitary grief.

“Everything gets fixed,” he said, “and we all stay broken.”

Tell me about a complicated man, how he wandered and was lost.

The virus came along less than a year later. A nasty little shit of a thing, it crushed time, obliterated chronology. If a small, round camera eye were to open and shut in my memory, it would capture so many disparate scenes and freeze them in terrific clarity—I

Everything went fast and everything went slow at the same time.

he might just have told himself that it was not time to rise anymore, all had been done, all had been seen, and he didn’t want captivity, and he didn’t want fame, and he could see no further way with love or hope or time, and so he remained, near the bottom of the ocean,

Most everything was quietly unrequited—the middle-aged desire to choreograph, to be a proper father, to experience love—but I had, at least, tried.

His brain quaked. It must have been an interior landslide. He lost equilibrium. He was unable to tell up from down. He tried to hold on. He was profoundly principled and yet at the same time altogether unreliable. He had a magnetic effect.

He wasn’t of this world. He wanted the elsewhere.

You can ache for years and not even know that you’ve been aching. The ache has gone so deep that it seems to come from another life, one not even remembered anymore. Then, when it spins back up in your mind, you can choose to shove it back down into the territory of a deeper ache, or you can try to coax it into some sort of meaning.