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As it turned out, people could never truly possess anything. No one could possess its essence, even if it was an indispensable part of their material or spiritual life. Not even then. How much would we have to do to fill the hollowness left by everything we had trampled along the way? How far would we have to walk to understand the outcome of that distant journey? Countless choices stood opposed on either side: right and wrong; positive and negative; yes and no; speaking and staying silent; smiling and not smiling; leaving and staying. Perhaps we would choose what we did not want to choose, or perhaps we would choose what we had once thought we could never choose. And faced with these endless choices, bewildered or desolate, we could seldom be sure.
How much mottled, drifting time would it take to learn the profound truth that nothing was absolute? Words whose moment of utterance had been forgotten, whose exact substance could no longer be recalled, slipped unnoticed into dormancy, waiting for the tiniest chance of being stirred awake. Then, one day, they came surging back, raw and bloody, as though some living remnant still clung to them, presenting themselves in silence, awaiting inspection-like disregard and a deliberate lifting of the head, forcing you to face them while leaving you unsettled or impassioned. How had new things worked their way beneath the skin? And how had they pushed aside the old things that occupied some place deep in the marrow? How many faint fluctuations would it take to prove that "once" had truly existed? When we brushed past one another, our faces cold as though all vitality had drained away, how many times had we carried deeply buried memories past someone with whom, at some forgotten point, we had