Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava

Author:Sergio De La Pava
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2024-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

ZERO

UNDER A DYING SUN

Dawn to dusk to dark to dawn again, the way birth initiates life until death and any possible rebirth, just as any thesis has to give rise to its antithesis before an ultimate synthesis. The way of the world is for everything that lives to be both growing and dying at the same time. And the notion that nothing is ever truly destroyed, only transformed.

* * *

I was born half a century ago in Jersey City, New Jersey, and that very moment began wondering why.

Is this memory, dream, dream of a memory, memory of a dream? Because the irreality of it now.

To live, even briefly and retrospectively, in a world where you don’t yet have the power of speech, is to exist as a kind of perfect victim.

My earliest visual memory is of my mother hovering over me and she wants me to wake but it’s solely the surrounding aural and visual clues that make me understand that’s what her words mean.

Then later, being alone. Being in danger. These are states words don’t have to be put to. But not being able to do so back then only added to the terror. Realizing you are alone in an apartment having only recently acquired the ability to walk.

This was a sign. The moment of your birth is fundamentally deceitful. Were you to truly experience it, you could be forgiven for concluding that you’d just been born into a world of great solicitous attention and fulfilled anticipation. Better to learn, even at age one, the greater truth: that we are, every one of us, alone and in danger.

At fourteen I watched my father get lowered into the ground and wondered, given the magnitude by which the dead outnumber the living, how we hadn’t yet run out of room. Later that year I saw the least handsome drowned man in the world, in the Florida everglades of all places, and sensed a solution.

Before my first quarter century I was engaged to be married while working simultaneously toward a law degree and a PhD, then I was none of those things and since then all things all at once and all the time.

Just before escaping to Colombia, my sister Genevieve was on the phone, not sure what to make of my plans except to demand and receive my promise that I would be careful.

Today I have all the words for being alone and in danger and even for staring down the ultimate irreality. But I will use none of them. Instead it’ll all end the way it began, in a dimension alien to language with a primal mixture of incomprehension and resignation.

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