When a film's heroine innocently coughs, you know that two scenes
later, at most, she'll be in an oxygen tent; when a man bumps into a
woman at the train station, you know that man will become the woman's
lover and/or murderer. In everyday life, where we cough often and are
always bumping into people, our daily actions rarely reverberate so
lucidly. Once we love or hate someone, we can think back and remember
that first casual encounter. But what of all the chance meetings that
nothing ever comes of? While our bodies move ever forward on the time
line, our minds continuously trace backwards, seeking shape and meaning
as deftly as any arrow seeking its mark.
Our fates were
already perfectly mapped out within us, just as we once waited
perfectly inside of our mothers, who themselves were held within the
depths of their mothers, our great-grandmothers.
It's impossible
for me not to wonder why I didn't go right when I should have gone
left, or, alternatively, see my movements as inexorable. If the cancer
was already there, it would have been discovered eventually, though
probably too late. Or perhaps that knock set in motion a chain of
physical events that created an opportunity for the cancer to grow
which it might not otherwise have found. Sometimes it is as difficult
to know what the past holds as it is to know the future, and just as an
answer to a riddle seems so obvious once it is revealed, it seems
curious to me now that I passed through all those early moments with no
idea of their weight.
Post a Comment