chapter 4 just dots

how can you miss something you never knew? have never known? is it because the human mind has the ability to imagine the future, an ability to imagine what will never be? it’s as if imagining the future is easier than remembering the past - learning from it, in any case. most of us spend our entire lives fearing what will never be, precisely because we want what will never be. and one reason it will never be, other than certain things being impossible, is that we spend so much time worrying about the thing we want never being rather than getting out there and trying to make the damn thing real. whatever that may be. the damn thing. and real. whatever that may be too. but if you did get out there and try to make the damn thing real, you might just learn that what you want - which let’s say is unattainable anyway - is different than what you need. the secret, seems to me, is to work out how to get what you have to be what you need. the past is too much to make sense of, the present not as we wish, so the future is where we live, and life streams by, constant yet hidden, like an underground river.

and so, all night I spent thinking about that girl, about what might be. I stared at the ceiling from my bed thinking of that girl, thinking of that hair, that back, that smile, that sick even, eulogising her, mythologising her, til it seemed that right there on the ceiling a real live giant brilliant blue butterfly would appear, with her face on it, hovering in its own incandescent radiance and bequeathing to me the truths of things that I could never know.