Recursion

by Blake Crouch

He thinks how it will be winter soon, and then another year gone by and another one on the chopping block, time flowing faster and faster. Life is nothing how he expected it would be when he was young and living under the delusion that things could be controlled. Nothing can be controlled. Only endured.

There are so few things in our existence we can count on to give us the sense of permanence, of the ground beneath our feet. People fail us. Our bodies fail us. We fail ourselves.

It’s somehow being projected for him, against his will, and he thinks perhaps there’s a reason our memories are kept hazy and out of focus. Maybe their abstraction serves as an anesthetic, a buffer protecting us from the agony of time and all that it steals and erases.

He has wondered lately if that’s all living really is—one long goodbye to those we love.

The ache of the memory is gone, but he doesn’t begrudge its visitation. He’s lived long enough to know that the memory hurt because many years ago, in a dead timeline, he experienced a perfect moment.