Time's a wastin'

The street was dark and covered in wet patches from a rain that had passed sometime during the night. As he walked he reflected on the slightness of her body held against his, the ghostly insubstantiality of her, hard pressed against him. Things would be no different between them. He complexly regretted the evening already, as a cross street approached, and he took a right turn and walked back towards the waiting arms of the city that he did not love.

 The regret was made complex by its relationship to his former self in time. Had he known earlier in the day how this afternoon and evening would turn out, he would have experienced every moment with increased joy and trepidation, like a hummingbird’s heart thumping frantically above a flower. He regretted not being able to travel back in time to let the prior version of himself know what was to come. How he would have liked to have known all day that he would see her all night. As in most infatuations, the sky would have been bluer, the music more perfect, the curve of her leg beneath the skirt more perfect. And now, reflecting back, he saw that all of these things had been true and that even though he had not noticed them at the time, he was noticing them now, in retrospect, the way the evening took shape around the two of them as if it were the nicest and warmest fitting coat on a cold winter’s day, and not what it was, a collection of missteps and accidents, made glorious through the symmetry of the evening they’d shared. In this way the evening had been like the rise of the whole human race, or like catching a snow flake on one’s tongue in a mild April storm, a matter of chance, meant to be savored, never repeated. 

The failure of his life hung over him as it were a distant yet unattainable dream. He felt, as he walked, as if his life were somehow akin to the ruins of the Roman empire, and he was aware the metaphorically it was grandiose. But he’d stood on the hill of Palatine, hid under an olive tree to block out the blistering Italian sun, and listened to stories of the emperors of old, how they’d probably flooded the Hippodrome and conducted naval battles, how the emperor probably sat on the hill opposite them, which was now just a grassy knoll beneath a busy looking street. And the emperor, or any of the senators who had sat on that particular knoll that day and watched a staged naval battle, a testament to their ingenuity and magnificence, would never have imagined that people would stand there two thousand years later, and have to try and reconstruct the whole scene from the dregs that had been left. That was how he felt. That if he, now, were to try and reconstruct his life from what he’d imagined as a child, or even a very young adult, that it would be hard to see, hard to imagine what dreams he’d once held.

He generally avoided thinking about such things because he knew that the failure lurked just beneath the surface of his thoughts, waiting patiently, for him to spend too long in thought, in reverie, some afternoon, and it was then that he’d pull him down, rip him to shreds. There was good reason to stay busy, to avoid too much thinking. He thought instead about a basketball game he’d been watching, wondered if they’d just pushed the pace a bit more if they’d have been able to win the game. He saw again, the brief flash of a person to pass the ball to, felt the shift of the ball smoothly from right to left hand, and the sudden and pinpoint delivery of the ball through the three pairs of arms outstretched when they saw him passing the ball across court, leading the person he was passing to away from the defenders and towards the basket, hitting him perfectly, with that left-handed bounce pass, and guiding him straight into a layup. It didn’t bother him that he remembered such a thing. It was a thing of beauty. The pleasure was aesthetic, passing a basketball would always be much closer to art than scoring it, more perfect. If Augustine or Aquinas were thinking of what position God would play in a game of pick up, it would no doubt be as pass first point guard.