The Wrong End of the Telescope

by Rabih Alameddine

Memory is a wound, you said. And some things are released only by the act of writing.

I wondered if that was how you interacted with those around you. You wanted people’s stories, not them. You cared for the tale, not the teller.

Their neuroses were perfectly complementary; their insanities fit together like a jigsaw. The odd piece was mine, not theirs.

“What is life if not a habituation to loss?”

In the blink of an eye—or after an eternity had passed—I grew older and found myself elsewhere, in a land where sunrises were more solid and people less so, a world made of paper and shadows, away from him, from her, from them, cast out of the Garden.