A regretful pathos snuck up on me this morning, as I lay in bed half awake. I suppose I allowed it to lie with me. It happens, but perhaps it hasn't happened for such a long time that I never thought of it happening. I think it's the reflective, self-inflected deliberation of the past few days, some part of the conversations at night I've had with Adeline. Things talked about which I don't have an answer for. Well, no, the answer lies with me.
Cher's song came on the radio once. It's such a classic, it goes, if I could turn back time! That's all it needs to say. Boom, you're sucked in. And her grand old hurting voice, so proud.Singers always have these tragi-comedic Greek theater lives, I almost assume she's got one too. The truth is I think listening to her song made me pensive, and thus off like Dante, irresistibly, to the pits. That's the difference between radio and everything else. Radio has true magic. When it comes alive, the moment is yours, and you take it. I don't even think it's magical, it's actually religious.
And here's the torch you have to carry in the descent, telling left from right. Do you think that life would be better if your choices at the time were more carefully taken? Or do you flee from such moral cowardice?Because the things you chose to do were those you wanted to do, given the circumstances, given the person you were, your perception of those persons you had in front of you. Being now your own Virgil, do you wish your younger Dante had acted with more wisdom? But let's not pretend; it's such a tempting pit to plunge into. Irresistible. Never-mind something so pedestrian as buying the lottery a day earlier; think about all the people you love who you could have loved more, all the girls you've left behind. Words, names, places, and faces; sunbeams, scenery and songs evoking passions left behind.
Maybe you could have fixed some things, but think about the enormity of life as it goes on around us.The daunting immutability of our own relationships in the present. And meaning wafts, does it not, it takes shape in the moment at which it was conceived. What was meaningful to you then, what you wanted to do for pure, if not good, reasons, would you change those things, just so that things turn out a different way? Would you then betray yourself tomorrow? The truth is, maybe you weren't the person for it at the time. Well, no, you weren't. Not a man good enough. That's the thing that haunts me, finally, but also the dregs that spare me agony. The tide rises and turns, smoothing over sand-prints underfoot, and you leave the water a different person, that's all.
Some days it might seem other choices were better. But you, as you are, weren't there.
