I don't know whether any of this is true or not. Everything happened that I have said happened, but it's memory now, the shadow of things.

The truth lives in its own time, recall is not the reality of the past. When friends depart, we remember them but they are changed; we hold only the fragment of them that touched us and our idea of them, which is now a part of us. Their reality is gone, intact but irretrievable, in another place through which we passed and can never enter again. I cannot go back nor can I bring them to me; so I must pursue the shadows to some middle ground, for I am strangely bound to all that happened then. We broke hard bread together. It's gone and long ago swept clean by the wind, only some stayed. Part of me lives there still. I don't know why. What is it that memory wants that it goes through it all again? Was there something I should have recognised? Some terrible wisdom? The kind of awful knowledge that stares out of the eyes of a dying man? I was at the edge then and almost grasped the meaning, but I lived and failed the final lesson and came home safe. I linger now, looking back for them, the best ones who stayed and learned it all.

Conx

• Topic: Reflections

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