Transient Phantoms
Sat Jun 08 2024
“We do not remember days, we remember moments.” — Cesare Pavese
I
There is a strange hush when the future refuses to arrive.
She now inhabits that hush—a mental cul-de-sac where only the present blares, loud and glaring, drowning every yesterday we once shared. Her hours are cushioned with laughter; my messages shrink to ice-chips: “Hey.” — “Busy.” — “I’ll text.” Each word rings like cold steel against spring buds—proof that warmth once visited and has recoiled.
I envy the friends who escort her through the daylight. Jealousy is a lodger without a lease, yet it rearranges every piece of heart-furniture. I stand in the doorway, puzzling whether the gap between us is a corridor or a continent. Grief has redrawn her map; I, too polite for trespass, wait at the border control.
II
Loving her once felt as inevitable as gravity; now it resembles Zeno’s paradox—each message halves the distance yet never quite reaches her.
Meanwhile the next chapter towers on the horizon: a new city, another ritual shedding of companions. People slip from my orbit with unsettling ease. Replaceable—the adjective I pin to my lapel when the room falls silent. Friends call me kind, attentive, unique. Kindness is applauded, uniqueness admired; both are meaningless to me.
Only my brother sticks, unexpectedly. He rings, he stays.
III
Most days I tread lukewarm water in a sea of pointlessness. Not drowning, not swimming, merely circling—because sinking would trouble the onlookers on shore. Survival, it turns out, is a matter of etiquette.
Occasional joys flicker—an unscripted joke, the amber stillness before rain—but they evaporate once the crowd disperses and the ceiling resumes its silent lecture. Loneliness is not lack of company; it is the untranslatability of one’s idiom. I speak, the world replies in a dialect adjacent to mine, every syllable slightly displaced.
I miss my father, his way of smuggling hope across any border. My own hope is contraband that forever leaks through my fingers. Still I persist in the experiment, as though meaning might crystallise from repetition alone.
IV
What, then, is a good life? Philosophy has erected cathedrals around the question, yet their foundations rest on one banal pebble: we are born, we vanish, and the audit between is hopelessly ambiguous. Happiness, success, moral worth—temporary scaffolds. Society hawks significance like fairground prizes, but the stall is rigged and the plush animals fray.
Perhaps the mistake lies in craving verdicts at all. The cosmos is radically indifferent; only humans prosecute existence. We have made living grotesquely intricate, then berate ourselves for failing mastery.
So I try—furtively, in small breaths—to simplify. To accept that drifting apart is not necessarily derailment; sometimes two satellites must choose separate ellipses to avoid collision. To concede that kindness is its own conclusion, even when unanswered. To believe—or, if belief is too bold, to hypothesise—that the point is not to win but to notice.
V
If she never again swings into my orbit, the universe will not reformat. Stars will explode, tides will return, someone somewhere will taste coffee for the first time and smile. Loss is neither punishment nor prophecy; it merely confirms we once held something worth missing.
In the ringing quiet I shall keep writing marginalia to myself—scribbles at the foot of a story without final chapters. Perhaps they will matter to no one. Perhaps they always mattered most.
And should our courses intersect once more, I will greet her not as the sum of my longing but as another traveller bearing a cracked compass. We might walk a while, compare constellations, then part again—grateful for the brief overlap of our paths.
In the end we are only transient phantoms in the eye of time.