A Stone Boat by Andrew Solomon

Author:Andrew Solomon [Solomon, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781476710914
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2013-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

VI

OCTOBER

Some days, I dream of a life without sequence, a life all mixed up like a crazy salad, in which, when you suddenly yearn for a week of childhood, you can have a week of childhood, in which, when you miss the quality of your grandmother’s voice singing, you can find again your grandmother singing, in which, when you want a stretch of the calm maturity of middle age, you can settle into a stretch of it. I would love to move back and forth, to have days saved like summer flowers caught forever in winter ice, days that I knew were waiting for me. What use was it to try to spend every waking moment with my mother in the months of her worsening illness? I somehow had the idea that if I spent every moment with her, the accrued hours would fill in for all the time I might not be spending with her for the rest of my life. If only I could have held some of those days for the occasions later in my life when the need for my mother, that vivid longing that comes with the sharpness of a fever, seeks only the fact of her presence to answer—for what I wanted was not to be with my mother every second of every day (a program well calculated to drive us both mad), but to be with my mother from time to time for the rest of my days.

Everything in life goes away or is taken from you before you are done with it. The present is always dark, since by having any moment you destroy the possibility of having it again. If death meant that you could see someone only once a decade for half an hour, and not that you could never see that person again, it would be a very different business. I have to be careful with my memories: they are like those pictures whose colors fade slowly in boxes or rapidly in the sun. I save certain memories and do not touch them, so that they will not get used up. I know that a time will come when the memories of my mother that I have traced as vividly as I can in these pages will seem as unreal as if they were someone else’s memories. Then I will take out the other memories, the ones I do not allow myself to describe here, and I will lose myself in them. They will no doubt be brittle by that point, but they will still be real to me, and I will keep them by my side, and regret that life is not a crazy salad, that it operates in sequences and progressions, and that nothing that has happened ever happens again.

• • •

I suppose it is not surprising that Bernard and I were to break up within six weeks of that dinner with my parents. It is not surprising, but it was nonetheless shocking and horrifying to me.

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