Accident

I had known her for years. One summer we became very close very quickly, like an obvious truth, an equation that was unable to go unsolved any longer. We were both amazed. It was a small and happy miracle, obliterating grey memories that held me in black syrup, suspended in life.

We agreed to meet after I had returned from a trip of miles by the thousands. The distance, the time. A journey that would end in a unique and shared space.

Upon returning, I started cleaning the house for her arrival, even though she told me not to and she didn't care what the place was like, as long as I was in it. For two jet-lagged days I cleaned at odd hours. I didn't hear from her. I knew that she was busy, so, I kept cleaning and anticipating her arrival. I felt worthy of the ground beneath my feet. I was in the world for sure. I had to be, you see - she liked me.

On the third day of expectation and anticipation, I received a phone message to call a woman whose name I didn't recognise. She said she had urgent information regarding my incoming friend. I called the number and announced myself to a woman, who upon hearing my name started hyperventilating and crying. She said, "Nobody knew how to reach you." The urgent information was that my friend, the one who liked me, had died in an accident two days ago. The voice on the phone told me that the day before her death, she spoke of little else than her upcoming trip to see me. We hung up soon after, so we could retreat into the horror of it all.

I had to go to the studio an hour later to begin a weeks' worth of work. I don't remember much of that week.

There's a small bend in the road near my home, and when I drive on it at night, I suddenly wonder if there's something I don't understand. Maybe I just don't have the right phone number to reach her. Maybe if I asked someone, they'd say "Oh, she's right over there, she's been wondering where you've been. She's been talking about you nonstop. Well, just don't stand there!" But I talked to her mother, and mothers always know when their children are gone. It's quiet in my room at night.

I've been seeing a lot of caves in the newspapers lately. Men in caves, isolated in vast stretches of mountain rock. In such a place, one could perhaps forget. In such a fissure, one could sit suspended in black syrup, breathing, extinct. A kind of hibernation until such time one would be unable to distinguish the sound of beautiful music from the sound of the whipping wind searching out cracks in the rocky expanse. And maybe at such time, the mind would become unburdened, so that gravity and purpose might rejoin this one who has tried so hard to forget so much.