Over the years I'd lodged her in my permanent past, my pluperfect idol, and I put her on ice, stuffed her with mothballs like a haunted ornament confabulating with the ghost of all my evenings. I'd dust her off from time to time and then put her back on the mantelpiece. She no longer belonged to earth or to life. All I was likely to discover at this point wasn't just how distant were the memories we created, it was the measure of loss that was going to strike me - a loss I didn't mind thinking about in abstract terms but which would hurt when stared at in the face, the way nostalgia hurts long after we've stopped thinking of things we may never have again.
"Loss" is a thoroughly inaccurate verb in the twisted skein of pain, where learning from someone, and growing up, are one and the same, just opposite banks on a river that passes from us to them, back to us and over to them again in this perpetual circuit where the chambers of the heart, like the trapdoors of adolescence, and the wormholes of time, and the false-bottomed drawer we call identity share a beguiling logic according to which the shortest distance between real life and the life unlived, between who we are and what we want, is a twisted staircase designed with the impish cruelty that only a higher power could manifest.
