Only later did I realize how much more complex my wish had been. I want a fast-forward button, and I want a rewind button and, perhaps most of all, I want a pause button, since I can see no evil in asking the fair moments to stay. I want these buttons for myself and for other people. It is a basic principle of traffic that if all the cars on the highway are moving at the speed limit, they cannot hit one another; only when one of them slows down or speeds up will an accident occur. We all know that our entire solar system is hurtling at some unimaginable speed across the galaxy, but since we’re all moving at that speed, it feels as though we aren’t moving at all. What is the point of time if it happens at the same rate to everyone? I want to be able to move and readjust and change in my relationship to other people and the world. I want to have some experiences over and over again until, like songs heard too frequently, they become tired and uninteresting. I want to skate through some kinds of pain and most kinds of indifference. I want to be born over and over and over, as though I were the world itself in all its changes.

VII: Three Loves

VII

THREE LOVES

I will tell you about my last trip to London, the trip to collect my belongings, the January trip. I will tell you about a happiness so brief it did not have time to be fragile. It was in the dull period after the New Year, when the gray sky over London stayed close to the ground, as though to hold in the cold. I had come back to London to get away from the persistent misery of New York, and to sleep long nights, one after another. Each day I called home and spoke to my mother, and each day her voice, pale and thin and taut as the top notes of a piccolo, echoed off some satellite and across to me. I had come because in New York I was up too close to what was happening. And I had come to get the odds and ends, sweaters and books and sheaves of music, that had been left behind when I’d set off for New York that early October day.