Where Reasons End

by Yiyun Li

Yet all these promises were as inadequate as love, promise and love being two anchors of cliché-land.

Days: the easiest possession, requiring only automatic participation. The days he had refused would come, one at a time. Neither my allies nor my enemies, they would wait, every daybreak, with their boundless patience and indifference, seeing if they could turn me into a friend or an enemy to myself. Never apologize, I said, for what you have let go.

How would I know it meant nothing, I thought, when something and nothing seem to be walking hand in hand now, identical twins dressed in each other’s outfits. The song, having circled in my head long enough, had acquired an indecipherability. All things indecipherable felt as though they possessed an inner logic.

See, now you think like everyone else: How can anyone… How can anyone—I said—what? How can anyone believe that one day he was here and the next day he was gone? Yet how can one, I thought. How can one know a fact without accepting it? How can one accept a person’s choice without questioning it? How can one question without reaching a dead end? How much reaching does one have to do before one finds another end beyond the dead end? And if there is another end beyond the dead end, it cannot be called dead, can it?

Most—I said, and then, to be less generalizing, I revised myself—many people don’t have to go to this extreme as I do so as not to lose someone.

Where else can one turn to but nature if one needs endless details to sustain oneself, I thought. Nature is not small, I said.

People talk about grief coming and going like waves, but I am not a breakwater, I am not a boat, I am not a statue left on a rocky shore, tested for its endurance.

Why write, he said, if you can feel? What do you mean? I always imagine writing is for people who don’t want to feel or don’t know how to. And reading? I asked. Nikolai was a good reader. For those who do.

I didn’t know it. I wasn’t feeling fine. I had but one delusion, which I held on to with all my willpower: We once gave Nikolai a life of flesh and blood; and I’m doing it over again, this time by words.

Are some days more special than others, or are we giving them names and granting them meaning because days are indifferent, and we try to wrangle a little love out of them as we tend to do with uncaring people?

These imaginations made it easier for me to feel sad, to weep even, but the tears were a veneer over the unspeakable. It was what I could not imagine that made the veneer dispensable: the bad dreams he had not told me over the years, the steps he had walked and the thoughts he had gone through on his last day, the adjectives he would have taught me, the days and the years ahead—with or without him. The unspeakable is a wound that stays open always, always, and forever.

Because preparing is not experiencing. Pre-living is not living. I will be sad today and tomorrow, a week from now, a year from now. I will be sad forever. I thought you said you took forever out of your dictionary. Once upon a time, I said. You put it back for me. A dictionary is not complete without the word forever, is it? Nikolai said. All words are indispensable, don’t you agree?

Oh don’t wish, he said. Wishing only wounds the heart. What’s the harm of spending a few minutes lost in wishing, I thought, when the deepest wound would remain open, day and night.

His joy and his suffering, neither in minor key, precluded moping. Yet what if, I thought, moping is a bridge to reach Moore’s later? There is no later, he said. For some people it’s now and now and now and now.

One of Nikolai’s friends had read a poem for him at his memorial, ending with a stanza: I am an atheist / but if one person can change that / it is you, Nikolai. I told him about the poem.

Words fall short, yes, but sometimes their shadows can reach the unspeakable.