Where Reasons End

by Yiyun Li

But calling Nikolai’s action inexplicable was like calling a migrant bird ending on a new continent lost. Who can say the vagrant doesn’t have a reason to change the course of its flight?

Somewhere tomorrow and somewhere yesterday—never somewhere today

Deadline as a word used to fascinate me, a word that connects time and space and death with such absoluteness.

Only today did I register that people often in their condolence letters called the loss unfathomable. The distance at the moment of loss could be calculated: 189,200 fathoms.

Not clear, though, is how to fathom time: from a moment to…Can forever be the other end point?

Days: the easiest possession, requiring only automatic participation. The days he had refused would come, one at a time.

All things indecipherable felt as though they possessed an inner logic.

a cardinal knocking on the window with his head and beak—was it fondness or animosity toward its own reflection that made the red bird persist?

I had long ago banished a few words from my dictionary: never, always, forever, words that equate one day to another, one moment to another. Time is capricious. To say never or always or forever is a childish way to reason with caprice.

To live you have to propagate delusions,

And who, my dear child, has taken the word lovable out of your dictionary and mine, and replaced it with perfect?

The unspeakable is a wound that stays open always, always, and forever.

Perfection is like a single snowflake, I said. It melts. A perfectionist melts too, Mommy.

Time does not come at a price. Sure it does. You don’t have to do anything for the minutes and hours and days to arrive,

Do you need a monument to remember me? I would rather you were reminded of me by a piece of cheesecake. Because you’re a baker, not an architect? Because cheesecake is perishable, he said.

If days are where we live, I thought, I will always want to know how people live in their days. Why? he said. Don’t you sometimes have the feeling that others have answers to questions you don’t have answers to?

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