First Of All

First of all,
there are many questions,
many things I’ve never asked you
many strands that cling to my thoughts
like thick green ivy
over an old wooden banister.
There are many questions
and this is one of them
only one of them.
One of many.

I had been writing and reading about this
About that day that I mentioned
That night in a circle
With a kind of silence punctuated by the noise of cars and people,
A crowd of bicycles outside the door
Whispers and an old man that says no
Even if you want him to say yes.

I remembered that day, that moment.
And you want to know
Why?
Why that moment and not another?
It is never easy to answer that question.
Why am I writing this now
And not a year ago
Or five years ago
Or a decade from now.
Why today?
Why moments before I have to go
And it’s already late
And I’m still sitting here writing.

In itself, it stood out,
Because it had a brilliance to it
A certain shade of colors
That refused to fade into each other
That refused to decay like a lonely afternoon
It held a promise
And also a door that closes
A door that we close ourselves
Then it stood out even more
For other reasons,
Reasons that I could say I didn’t begin
At least not the me that is consciously speaking.

She mentioned it several times.
I never fully followed her down that route.
I didn’t want to.
Not even then.
(Old habits,
and it is all about habits really.
Yours and mine.)
When she did mention it,
it made me hesitate,
it made me doubt the rest of what she told me,
it made me wonder what she was getting at
it made me look away.
She was clearly wrong in this one thing.
In this, she was wrong
She had been wrong
She would be wrong
She had to be.

Just the fact that She mentioned it,
that in itself made it so I would remember it
more clearly, more often
than I would have otherwise.
When it came into my mind the other day,
Completely out of nowhere
Under the cooling stream of water from the shower
I thought that there was some kind of clue
hidden in its its folds,
a path, a route, a way towards understanding
understanding what happened
between us.
What happened at the beginning
what happened at the end.

I don’t have a preconceived notion of an answer.
I hope you don’t have one either.
I don’t believe such answers are simple.
I see it more like a detective story,
A detective story that refuses to yield an ending
A detective story where we are the detectives,
But we are also the criminals
And the only witnesses,
The only witnesses that can be trusted
Even if we constantly lie
To others
To each other
And to ourselves.

Now it’s just a path
We could have followed
A path we didn’t follow
Like so many others
One more among many
And it is only to be expected
That we should think
That it is as it should be.
What else could we possibly
Say?