Highlights

A parent is always scared of being an imposition, to say nothing of a bore.

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Is it that you don't like people, or that you just grow tired of them and can't for the life of you remember why you ever found them interesting?

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Jealous without being the slightest bit in love - you are difficult.

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It's just that the magic of someone new never lasts long enough. We only want those we can't have. It's those we lost or who never knew we existed who leave their mark. The othersbarely echo.

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Everything went so fast and felt so natural, that neither saw the need to discuss the matter with our partners or give them a second thought. We simply let go of all our inhibitions. In those days we still had inhibitions.

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Aren't those the absolute worst scenarios: the things that might have happened but never did and might still happen though we've given up hoping they could.

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Why should that surprise you? You lead separate lives, regardless of how they intersect or how many vigils the two of you share.

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Perhaps going about one's daily life with all its paltry joys and sorrows is the surest way of keeping true life at bay.

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To me it proves that life and time are not in sync. It's as if time was all wrong and the wife's life was lived on the wrong bank of the river or, worse yet, on two banks, with neither being the right one. None of us may want to claim to live life in two parallel lanes but all have many lives, one tucked beneath or right alongside the other. some lives wait their turn because they haven't been lived at all, while others die before they've lived out their time, and some are waiting to be relived because they haven't been lived enough. Basically, we don't know how to think of time, because time doesn't really understand time the way we do, because time couldn't care less what we think of time, because time is just a wobbly, unreliable metaphor for how we think about life. Because ultimately it isn't time that is wrong for us, or we for time. It may be life itself that is wrong.

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What these men have to offer I already have. And everything they want they don't deserve, or I may not have in me to give. That's the sad part.

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The words we'd spoken were sufficiently vague for us not to know what the other meant or what we ourselves meant, yet we both immediately sensed, without knowing why, that we'd seized the other's underlying meaning precisely because it wasn't spoken.

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My problem is discovering what not faking is — and this is difficult and scary for me, because my bearings are always pitched to who I ought to be, not to who I am, to what I should have, not to what I never knew I craved, to life as I found it, not to the life I've let myself think was only a dream.

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"Love is easy," I said. "It's the courage to love and to trust that matters, and not all of us have both. But what you may not know is that you taught me far more than I've taught you! These vigils, for instance, are perhaps nothing more than my desire to tread in your footsteps, to share with you anything and everything and be in your life as I always want you to be in mine. I've taught you how to earmark moments where time stops, but these moments mean very little unless they're echoed in someone you love."

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I noticed that he tended to start some sentences with the word and, perhaps to smooth out the jolting or missing transaction between unrelated subjects, especially when broaching something slightly more probing, more personal.

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Just kiss me, will you, if only to help me get over being so visibly flustered.

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Perhaps he'd seen that sometimes it's best to stop things when they're perfect rather than race on and watch them sour.

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We haven't spoken in ages, and I don't know that we're friends, though I'm sure we will always be. He's always read me extremely well, and I have a feeling that he suspects that if I never write it's not because I don't care but because a part of me still does and always will, just as I know he still cares, which is why he too never writes. And knowing this is good enough for me.

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Sometimes I want to tell him things, but then I put it off, and even telling myself that I'm putting it off gives me some pleasure, though we may never speak.

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Maybe because I never really let go or lose myself with others. After an instant of passion, I always fall back to being the autonomous me.

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But my younger self bungled and sped through so many things. An older self is more frugal, more cautious, and therefore more reluctant — or more desperate — to rush into things he already fears he might never find again.

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"Fate, if it exists at all," he said, "has strange ways of teasing us with patterns that may not be patterns at all but that hint at a vestigial meaning still being worked out."

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Then maybe when you get to be my age and the dearth of things life has to offer becomes more evident by the day, maybe then you can start noticing those tiny accidents that turn out to be miracles and that can redefine our lives and cast an incandescent luster over things that, in the great scheme of things, could easily be meaningless. But this is not meaningless.

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Because the young teenager still lingers inside me, and occasionally utters a few words, then ducks and goes into hiding. Because he's afraid of asking, because he think you'll laugh that he asked, because even trusting is difficult. I'm shy, I'm scared, and I'm old.

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You know, life is not so original after all. It has uncanny ways of reminding us that, even without a God, there is a flash of retrospective brilliance in the way fate plays its cards. It doesn't deal us fifty-two cards; it deals, say, four or five, and they happen to be the same ones our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents played. The cards look pretty frayed and bent. The choice of sequences is limited: at some point the cards will repeat themselves, seldom in the same order, but always in a pattern that seems uncannily familiar. Sometimes the last card is not even played by the one whose life ended. Fate doesn't always respect what we believe is the end of a life. It will deal your last card to those who come after. Which is why I think all lives are condemned to remain unfinished. This is the deplorable truth we all live with. We reach the end and are by no means done with life, not by a long stretch! There are projects we barely started, matters unresolved and left hanging everywhere. Living means dying with regrets stuck in your craw. As the French poet says, Le temps d'apprendre à vivre il est déjà trop tard, by the time we learn to live, it's already too late. And yet there must be some small joy in finding that we are each put in a position to complete the lives of others, to close the ledger they left open and play their last card for them. What could be more gratifying than to know that it will always be up to someone else to complete and round off our life? Someone whom we loved and who loves us enough.

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The libido accepts all currencies, and vicarious pleasures have an over-the-counter exchange rate that is considered reliable enough to pass for real. No one ever went bankrupt borrowing someone else's pleasure. We go bankrupt only when we want no one.

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And some of our fondest desires end up meaning more to us unrealized than tested — don't you think?

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Or perhaps what he might have meant was this: If the music doesn't change you, dear friend, it should at least remind you of something profoundly yours that you've probably lost track of but that actually never went away and still answers when beckoned by the right notes, like a spirit gently roused from a prolonged slumber with the right touch of a finger and the right silence between the notes.

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Music doesn't give you answers to questions I don't know how to ask. It doesn't tell me what I want. It reminds me that I may still be in love, though I'm no longer sure I know what that means, being in love. I think about people all the time, yet I've hurt many more than I've cared for. I can't even tell what I feel, though feel something I still do, even if it's more like a sense of absence and loss, maybe even failure, numbness, or total unknowing. I was sure of myself once, I thought I knew things, knew myself, and people loved that I reached out to them when I blustered into their lives and didn't even ask or doubt that I mightn't be welcome. Music reminds me of what my life should have been. But it doesn't change me.

Perhaps, says the genius, music doesn't change us that much, nor does great art change us. Instead it reminds us of who, despite all our claims or denials, we've always known we were and are destined to remain. It reminds us of the mileposts that we've buried and hidden and then lost, of the people and things that mattered despite our lies, despite the years. Music is no more than the sound of our regrets put to a cadence that stirs the illusion of pleasure and hope. It's the surest reminder that we're here for a very short while and that we've neglected or cheated or, worse yet, failed to live our lives. Music is the unlived life. You've lived the wrong life, my friend, and almost defaced the one you were given to live.