Great Circle

by Maggie Shipstead

I’d like to think I will remember this particular moon, seen from the particular angle of this balcony on this night, but if I forget, I will never know that I’ve forgotten, as is the nature of forgetting. I’ve forgotten so much—almost all I’ve seen. Experience washes over us in great waves. Memory is a drop caught in a flask, concentrated and briny, nothing like the fresh abundance from which it came.

The world unfurls and unfurls, and there is always more. A line, a circle, is insufficient. I look forward, and there is the horizon. I look back. Horizon. What’s past is lost. I am already lost to my future.

“That’s how I felt when I saw you. You were in my bones.”

She might have disappeared then, in a cold place without islands or atolls, where people couldn’t dream her back to life, make her a castaway. They would have looked for her and found only water, as they did anyway, later.

I want love but not a wife, not yet. I want drink but not dissolution. I want momentum but not to careen. I suppose what I want is some kind of equilibrium, but I suppose I want the thrill of tipping back and forth, too.

She was like a book with the final pages torn out, leaving him at the mercy of his imagination. If he were to see her, she would no longer be an enticing mystery but a real woman, no longer a dream sylph his mind could turn to when things went awry with other women (as they always did) nor a magical solution to all the riddles and disappointments of his existence. Also, he theorized, he’d been so starved for love when he met her, so desperate for a life of his own, that he’d blown their youthful romance wildly out of proportion. It had been a summer of kisses, no more. If he could just see her, he would be cured of her.

Where to begin? At the beginning, of course. But where is the beginning? I don’t know where in the past to insert a marker that says: here. Here is where the flight began. Because the beginning is in memory, not on a map.