Endings have a habit of travelling backwards. If someone does not want me now, perhaps they never did; if something lasted a week, perhaps it was nothing. I don’t think the final chapter has that authority. People change, futures collapse, witnesses die, and memory edits without asking. None of that can make Wednesday cease to have occurred. Permanence is not the test of reality. Small is not the same word as false. A thing can disappear completely and still have happened.

There is a peculiar violence in the past tense. We were happy. I loved her. He was my friend. There was an us. Grammatically, none of those sentences says anything more remarkable than that something which was once true is not true in precisely the same way now. If somebody does not want me now, I begin to wonder whether she ever really wanted me. If a friendship ends badly, the ending starts colonising everything that preceded it until every kindness looks suspect and every disagreement becomes evidence that the collapse had secretly been there from the beginning. If a relationship lasted twenty years and failed, perhaps I wasted twenty years; if it lasted a week, perhaps the brevity proves that it never meant anything in the first place. We allow the final chapter to appoint itself editor of all the others, cutting scenes, rewriting motives and explaining to the characters what was really happening to them when, inconveniently, they were actually there.

Sometimes later knowledge really does expose an earlier misunderstanding: people lie, including to themselves; memory is unreliable; desire can be unequal; two people can occupy what appears to be the same relationship while experiencing radically different things. I am not proposing some sentimental preservation order under which every happy memory must be protected from subsequent evidence. But neither do I believe the latest truth is necessarily the truest truth, with everything before it demoted to rehearsal, illusion or fraud. People exist in time, which means they change in time. Someone can love you and later not love you. Somebody can want a life with you and later want a different life. Somebody can be your closest friend and eventually become somebody you barely know. The later state can explain the earlier one, complicate it and expose things neither of you understood while you were inside it, but it cannot automatically invalidate it.

I’ve been thinking about this because of somebody I am going to call the English Teacher. She actually is an English teacher. She did not volunteer to become a character in an essay, and I see no reason to give her more identifying information than the argument requires. We met, we talked, I liked her very much and, for a short while, it appeared she liked me too. At one point she looked at me and said, “There’s a sadness in you.”

“I’ve had a tough life,” I said.

Which was true, although spectacularly inadequate. There are answers that require several bottles of wine, a fistful of Valium, probs some acid, a clear weekend, and perhaps professional indemnity insurance, and frankly I was trying to have dinner.

What mattered was that she had seen something quickly. There was warmth afterwards, conversation, the prospect of seeing one another again, and, for a little while, there was a Wednesday in my future that meant something different from the Wednesdays surrounding it. Then circumstances changed, and there wasn’t.

It was a week. A week is not twenty years. Duration matters because duration allows things to accumulate, which brevity cannot contain: history, habit, shared language, boredom, forgiveness, resentment, knowledge, all the ordinary Wednesdays on which a long relationship is actually built. Duration is not the only measure of significance. A song can last three minutes and remain with you for forty years; a conversation can take ten minutes and change the direction of a life.

It was real at the scale at which it existed, and the scale was small.

Small is not the same word as false.

Forever Changes

I’ve had a much longer version of the same problem with Leiann. There was a Leiann-and-Wayne I understood, and another Leiann-and-Wayne I understood much less, and the temptation, when a relationship changes profoundly, is to decide that one of those things must reveal the truth about the other. They were not two women. Leiann changed. I changed. Her desires changed, my desires changed, our circumstances changed, and therefore whatever was being produced between us changed as well. The names remained reassuringly stable, while the relational thing they referred to did not.

This seems obvious when we talk about almost anything except people. Birmingham is still Birmingham despite being profoundly different from the city my grandparents knew. A river retains a name while different water passes through it. A church can be recognisably the same church after centuries of argument, schism, reform, architectural alteration and people being murdered over disagreements concerning matters that most of their descendants cannot adequately explain. Even the body manages continuity without stasis. Yet in love we are strangely attracted to the language of true and false. Which Leiann was the real Leiann? Which Wayne was the real Wayne? Which version of the relationship reveals what had really been happening all along? Those questions are malformed. The earlier Leiann was not an authentic original later replaced by an impostor, nor does what happened later prove that what happened earlier existed only in my imagination. People met at particular points in time, and then those people changed.

That doesn’t mean I have to like every change. I preferred some versions of us to others. There are earlier configurations of relationships I would happily have back and later ones I would not, just as there are previous versions of Wayne I miss and others I am relieved no longer to be. But preference is not ontology. I cannot declare a person unreal because she changed in a direction I disliked. What exists between two people can itself have a life: it can emerge, alter, grow stronger, grow weaker, and eventually cease to exist in the form in which either person once knew it. Loss does not require death. The living can become unavailable to one another while remaining inconveniently alive.

Love has always had a difficult relationship with time. We say always, forever, never leave me, as though duration were not merely something we desire but the final proof that the desire was sincere. Tennyson’s lines from In Memoriam A.H.H., “’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all”, have been rubbed smooth by familiarity. In Memoriam is a vast and difficult elegy written out of the death of Arthur Hallam. I am not even sure about better. What interests me is the grammar: “loved and lost”. The loss follows the love. It does not retroactively replace it.

Which leaves the more difficult question.

What Was Real?

Baudrillard is dangerous company here because once you invite him into a question about reality, he has a habit of nicking the furniture. Once the relationship itself is gone, what exactly remains? Messages, perhaps. Photographs. Objects. Places. The story I tell afterwards. The story she tells afterwards. Memory, except memory is notoriously less an archive than a reconstruction. We look at a photograph of two people who later separated and imagine we can see the separation already forming between them. We reread an affectionate message after rejection and hunt for evidence that the affection wasn’t really affectionate. The ending becomes hyperreal: more authoritative than the messy thing that actually happened, because it gives us a clean narrative to explain everything that came before.

Memory collaborates enthusiastically. We edit without knowing we are editing, incorporate later knowledge, remember photographs as though we remember the moment photographed, and tell stories so many times that eventually we may be remembering the story rather than the event. There are incidents from my own life for which I can no longer confidently separate what I experienced from what I have subsequently said about the experience. The story acquires timing, shape, emphasis and a good ending; life, inconsiderately, had none of those things.

And yet there is a point at which I want to stop being clever about it.

It fucking happened.

Representation can change. Memory can distort. Later evidence can radically alter our understanding of what an event meant. But if I was happy on Wednesday and discovered something terrible on Friday, Friday does not acquire the power to travel backwards and prevent Wednesday’s happiness from having been experienced. It may tell me that I misunderstood Wednesday. It may reveal that the other person experienced Wednesday differently. It may force me to reconsider almost everything I believed about Wednesday. What it cannot do is make Wednesday cease to have occurred.

This distinction becomes stranger when what disappears is not something in the past but something in the future.

There Was Going to Be a Wednesday

For a few days there was going to be a Wednesday with the English Teacher. We did not meet. There was no second dinner, no conversation, no discovery that we were wonderfully compatible or that one of us was secretly boring the other shitless. Perhaps the second meeting would have been magnificent. Perhaps it would have demonstrated conclusively that there should never be a third.

The imagined relationship belongs to imagination. The anticipation does not.

Human beings live partly in futures which have not happened yet. We clear the diary. We decide what to wear. We think about what we might talk about. A child experiences the week before Christmas differently because Christmas is coming; somebody waiting for test results experiences Wednesday differently because Friday exists ahead of them; a person planning to emigrate begins leaving long before the aeroplane takes off. The future event is not actual, but our orientation towards it is a present-tense fact. For those few days, Wednesday contained another person, and that changed the emotional shape of the days before it.

Then Wednesday disappeared.

Not the calendar Wednesday. What disappeared was a possibility that had already been integrated into my immediate future. The future Wednesday was not real. The hope for it was.

I have accumulated a fuck lot of dead people. My stepdaughter, Lillie, even laughs at me about it.

That is an ugly sentence, but I cannot find a prettier one that is more accurate. As I get older, the population of my inner world increasingly consists of people whose side of the conversation has ended. Grandad Bill had a heart attack in front of me when I was young. Uncle George died. Dad died, violently and terribly, and left consequences I spent decades trying to understand. Dave died. Richard Martin died, taking with him the other living copy of things which had existed only between Richard and me. Anne-Marie died. Buchan Verdi, Butch to us, died. Michael died. Aunt Amy and Uncle John died. Anita Looker, my mate Richard’s Mom (another Richard), died. Bill, my mum’s husband, died. Graham “Gun Shot Wound” Smith-Winnard died. Paul, who taught me karate and later taught the children, died. Alan, who assisted Paul at karate, died. Ted Edwards, who taught me how to shoot, died. John Detheridge, who taught me to enjoy shooting, died. Gary Twist died. Charles Jordan died. And Nan, perfect, wonderful Nan, died. There are others, because once you have lived long enough, there are always others.

These people did not occupy equal places in my life, and their deaths did not affect me equally. Some deaths rearranged the architecture. Some removed a room. Some took away a familiar landmark I had assumed would continue being there. Grief is not democratic, and neither is memory. Each death removes a point from the human map, and eventually you become aware that a substantial part of the country through which you travelled now exists only in the people who remember it.

This is where a small new loss can make an unexpectedly large sound. Not because the English Teacher became equivalent to Dad or Dave or Richard. Human beings are resonant systems. Strike one string and another tuned closely enough begins to vibrate. Somebody deciding not to see me again is not somebody dying. But I do not encounter a new loss with only the portion of myself created during that particular encounter. I arrive carrying all the earlier integrations, absences, expectations and reflexes which have made me what I am.

We do not encounter loss with only the part of ourselves created in the thing we have just lost. We encounter it with everyone we have ever been.

You cannot lose what was never integrated into your world. People enter routines, identities, memories and expectations. Somebody becomes the person you ring when something happens. Somebody occupies Christmas. Somebody knows the joke without the explanation. Somebody exists in your mental model of next year. The degree of integration varies enormously, which is why the consequences of disintegration vary enormously too, and why they can be so asymmetric. One person may have left a relationship internally months before saying so while the other discovers the loss in a single sentence. One person can experience relief while another experiences devastation. Death takes the asymmetry further still: the dead person has left the ordinary field of human experience altogether while everybody who loved them is left reorganising a world in which they no longer participate.

A relationship ending is not the same as Dave dying. Rejection is not bereavement. With the living, however impossible return may seem, physical return remains inside the universe of possibility. Death closes that particular door, and “just beyond the veil” is a wondrous metaphor for the closeness and distance of funereal grief. After Dave died, I sometimes reached for the phone. I have written about that elsewhere. The point here is simpler: even the reflex dies. Memory dies too.

Last Times

Paul Hughes, longtime guitarist with the Tenants, Dave’s band[sic], has, in the distant past, quoted L. P. Hartley to me: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Paul has a better claim than most to know. He was there too.

This is probably why Doctor Zhivago has always destroyed me. It is my favourite film, and while I love the scale of it, the Revolution, the landscape, Maurice Jarre, David Lean making snow and trains and human faces feel equally enormous, the things that reliably make me cry are much smaller. They are about time.

Yuri watches Lara leave Varykino and does not know that this is the last time he will see her knowingly; years later he glimpses her again from a Moscow streetcar, fights to reach her and dies before he can make himself seen. There is something almost intolerable to me about last times that are not recognised as last times. There should be a bell. Somebody should say, Pay attention: you will never see this person again. Instead, the last conversation with somebody can be about something completely unimportant. The last time you sit in a particular room, you may be thinking about lunch. The last time you hear somebody laugh, you don’t necessarily store the sound carefully enough.

Only afterwards does the moment acquire its border.

Later knowledge changes the memory without changing the event. Yuri’s final sight of Lara becomes unbearable because we know what follows, but the Yuri inside the earlier moment does not possess our knowledge. We cannot send it back to him. The past is full of people who do not know what we know about what happens next.

Varykino does something different. The house survives while the world that made the house meaningful has been destroyed. Yuri and Lara inhabit this extraordinary frozen ruin for a while, surrounded by history and winter, creating an absurd little pocket of private life inside forces far larger than either of them. A childhood house can still exist while the family that made it home has scattered or died. A pub remains after the people you went there to meet are gone. A room can be almost physically identical and experientially unrecognisable. Structure persists while the world disappears.

Then there is the balalaika.

At the end of the film, Yevgraf has told Tanya the story of Yuri and Lara and still cannot conclusively give her the provenance of her own life. She walks away carrying a balalaika. Asked whether she can play it, her companion says she can, although nobody taught her, and Yevgraf answers, “Then it’s a gift.” The film has carried the instrument, and the idea of the gift, from Yuri’s mother through Yuri and finally into this young woman who does not fully know the history she may embody.

That breaks me.

Not because Yuri has somehow returned. Not because Lara has been restored. Not because the film has cheated history and given everybody the ending they deserved. It hasn’t. People disappear into revolution, labour camps, illness and time. Something has travelled forward without the person carrying it necessarily knowing where it came from.

Not ghosts. Consequences.

I am Catholic, so I do not believe that the dead are reducible to consequences. I believe in resurrection, not merely remembrance, and in a God for whom a human being does not cease to be because the last earthly witness has died. Faith changes what I believe about a person’s final reality. It does not abolish the experience of their absence here.

And absence accumulates.

Eventually, there will be no one alive who remembers Grandad Bill as a living man. The last person who remembers Buchan will die. The memories I share with Richard and Dave, which now exist only in me, will disappear when I do, unless some part of them escapes into a story, and even the story will eventually disappear. Photographs decay. Servers fail. Passwords vanish. Languages die. Civilisations become archaeological strata and then, given enough time, even archaeology disappears. Most human beings who have ever lived are already beyond individual recovery. We do not know their names, what made them laugh, whom they loved, whether they were frightened of spiders, sang badly, or told the same fucking story every Christmas.

If remembrance were the condition of reality, most of human reality would already have been annulled.

Which brings me to Roy Batty.

Tears in Rain

At the end of Blade Runner, Roy is dying with experiences that nobody else possesses and which nobody else can inherit simply by hearing him describe them. He has seen things his listener has not seen. He knows those moments are going to disappear with him, “like tears in rain”.

The usual consolation would be to say that nothing truly disappears because we pass things onwards. Sometimes we do. The balalaika travels. Dave’s stories travel. A mannerism passes from a father to a son, a joke from one friend to another, a phrase from a teacher into a child who eventually teaches somebody else. Buchan changed people who changed other people. Richard did. Anne-Marie did. We all send consequences into futures we will never witness, most of them without attribution.

But sometimes nothing detectable travels.

A private experience can die with the person who experienced it. A story can be forgotten. The final photograph can be destroyed. The last witness can die. Consequences themselves are finite; they are not a covert form of immortality.

Roy’s tear gives me a better answer. A tear falls into rain and within moments there may be no possible way to distinguish which water was tear and which was rain. The information disappears. The boundary disappears. Eventually, even the person who saw it fall disappears.

The tear still fell.

Rain can disperse it. Rain cannot travel backwards through time.

The present can change our understanding of the past because understanding belongs to the present. It can reveal deception, expose misunderstanding, alter emphasis and destroy interpretations we once cherished. What it cannot do is make an occurrence not have occurred. Representation is unstable. Memory is unstable. Meaning is unstable. Occurrence is much more stubborn.

The Wednesday with the English Teacher did not occur. I don’t get to claim it. The expectation of it was. For a brief period I was excited about another human being and oriented towards a future in which I would see her again. Then I learned that I wouldn’t, and the possibility closed. What hurt was partly her, partly the lost possibility and partly the enormous resonant apparatus into which that small loss arrived.

An Invincible Summer

Camus wrote in Return to Tipasa, “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” I have always liked the line and distrusted what inspirational culture has done to it. There is no cosmic customer-service agreement under which sufficient suffering entitles us to compensation.

I have no guarantee that somebody else will arrive. I have no guarantee that any future relationship will last. Leiann is not going to become an earlier Leiann simply because I preferred an earlier version of us. The dead remain absent from ordinary human life. The English Teacher is entitled to continue with hers and owes me neither a return nor a role in the story I make from having met her. Hope becomes dishonest when it quietly turns into a claim on somebody else’s freedom.

What interests me is smaller: after everything, I could still get excited about someone.

I had not expected that to matter as much as it did. After Dad and Dave, Richard and Buchan, Anne-Marie and all the others; after Leiann and the other ways in which people can be lost without dying; after accumulating enough evidence to know perfectly well what attachment costs, some part of me was still capable of sitting opposite another human being and thinking, Oh. You are interesting. I would like more of this. I could still imagine Wednesday.

That is not redemption. It is certainly not a promise. The summer, if the metaphor is useful at all, is the continuing capacity to experience warmth despite knowing that warmth is temporary. Winter does not make the previous summer fraudulent, and the possibility of another winter does not make it irrational to feel the sun when it is there.

Grandad Bill was here. Dad was here. Dave was here. Richard was here. Buchan was here. Anne-Marie was here. They occupied rooms, told stories, annoyed people, loved people, frightened people, made them laugh, altered them, and eventually left a world in which other people had to learn the shape of their absence. Some left enormous visible consequences and some left things so private that they will disappear with the last person who remembers them. The difference matters for history. It does not decide whether their lives were real.

The same discipline has to apply to the living. There really was a Leiann-and-Wayne I loved being part of, even though neither Leiann nor Wayne remained the people required to keep that particular thing intact. There really was a dinner with an English Teacher who looked at me and saw sadness. There really was, for a few days, a man looking forward to Wednesday.

Doctor Zhivago understands this. Yuri sees Lara and loses her. The house is inhabited and becomes a ruin. The balalaika travels onwards while almost everything required to explain it disappears. Blade Runner gives me the same thought in a different image: the tear enters the rain and the distinction is lost. Neither work promises preservation. They offer something harder: the possibility that disappearance and reality are not opposites.

I think that is what I need from the past tense. Not a promise that what I loved will return, nor an argument that every loss was secretly worthwhile, and certainly not the revolting consolation that everything happens for a reason. Was means that something existed in time and does not exist in the same way now. It does not mean it wasn’t real.

Something does not have to last in order to have been real. A person can change without their earlier self becoming a fraud; a relationship can end without every affectionate thing inside it becoming counterfeit; a future can fail to arrive while the hope that preceded it remains part of the life actually lived. Eventually even memory gives way, because we give way, and the rain takes the evidence with it.

But the rain does not make the tear imaginary.

It fell.