Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

You can get hold of only a corner of her life.

There was no one I liked as much to have beside me. And at the same moment there was a relief in us being possibly finished.

You return to that earlier time armed with the present, and no matter how dark that world was, you do not leave it unlit. You take your adult self with you. It is not to be a reliving, but a rewitnessing.

We are foolish as teenagers. We say wrong things, do not know how to be modest, or less shy. We judge easily. But the only hope given us, although only in retrospect, is that we change. We learn, we evolve. What I am now was formed by whatever happened to me then, not by what I have achieved, but by how I got here.

If a wound is great you cannot turn it into something that is spoken, it can barely be written.