Twist

by Colum McCann

My writer acquaintance was the sort who had never really met anyone he liked better than himself.

it. I suppose we

end up surviving by our ability to forget.”

“I mean, London is sometimes so beautiful that it is difficult to remember that it is built on a whole empire of lies.”

Maybe it was all just one vast art scheme that she had orchestrated herself, a comment on who we were, our breakdown, our dissolution, our severance from ourselves.

the wonder of things is that they were ever created in the first place. Maybe that was the simplicity we needed. Everything is made to be disassembled. Not all of it can be repaired. All there is is the trying.

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.

Take a hair from your head. Better

still, an eyelash. Study it. That is the width of the glass tube that carried the photo that Zanele took,

The tubes are tiny. They are hollow. They weigh nothing. All they carry is light. I can’t presume to explain this. It is one of the things that still continues to fill me with wonder.