Absent Friends

There are names that seem to withdraw from life without ever consenting to leave the heart. They ask not of remembrance and send no message across the years, yet they return with a gentle certainty that belongs only to things which have survived every attempt to forget them. One receives them almost with surprise, as though meeting a traveler believed long dead who has entered the room without disturbing the latch.

What power grants such endurance to one soul while another slips so completely into obscurity? The question has occupied wiser minds than mine, and none has answered it. Affection submits to no tribunal. It preserves a face without consulting reason and refuses every argument offered by time. The years may alter a voice, whiten the hair, bend the shoulders beneath their patient labor, yet they never persuade the inward life to surrender what it has once claimed for its own.

It has often seemed to me that silence possesses a strange ambition. It begins as a courtesy, grows into habit, and finally assumes the dignity of fate. Two people continue beneath the same heavens, each persuaded that the first word belongs to the other, until that single unwritten sentence acquires greater consequence than all those they once exchanged with ease. Nothing has been forbidden. Nothing has been lost through violence. Yet an entire friendship comes to rest upon an absence so slight that neither can remember the hour in which it first appeared.

Then the mind releases the visitor. The forgotten name returns to its hidden place, carrying with it neither grief nor consolation. It leaves only the unsettling suspicion that we ourselves inhabit the memory of another with equal uncertainty, waiting there in perfect stillness, as though a single forgotten call might restore an entire world.