One step away

Some days you were appalled when you looked back on how you’d lived: the lack of help, the unwillingness to be helped, to help yourself. (Life, vitality, one step away from your parallel world, your ghost-world.) When you realised how much time you’d wasted, or how time had wasted you. How you’d let time live you. It felt as if time stretched out before you as you walked through the park to the supermarket, like a path running into the desert. A woman was what you needed, of course, that had been obvious too long. A good woman who could raise up those long-dead feelings, that long-dead life. Love, sex, work, the union of male and female, all that. After all, life was so simple – and yet infinitely complex, the moment you made the mistake of thinking, of watching. Infinitely near and infinitely far. One step away and then another million.