The City of Second Thoughts
選ばなかった無数の人生とすれ違う街
The City of Second Thoughts was built, its people liked to say, entirely in the mood.
Nobody there ever quite decided anything; they merely rehearsed decisions, endlessly, in the theatre of what might yet be.
Its streets, which forked at every opportunity, seemed designed less for arrival than for the prolonging of choice.
Had the founders chosen a single plan, the city might have been finished centuries ago; instead they chose to keep choosing.
I had come expecting a destination and found, to my unease, a place devoted wholly to the road not taken.
In the cafes, patrons ordered and un-ordered, their coffees cooling as they weighed the life that each cup might inaugurate.
Everywhere I walked, I brushed against the ghosts of unchosen lives, faint and courteous presences that had almost been, and then had not.
One of them, a version of myself who had stayed at home and married young, nodded to me gravely across a square.
Had I made a single different turn, I understood, I too might have thinned into one of these tender, unfinished apparitions.
The inhabitants spoke of the future not as a place they were walking toward but as a crowd of futures jostling to be born.
Every yes, they knew, is the quiet funeral of a thousand equally possible noes.
This knowledge, which would have paralysed a lesser people, they wore instead with a delicate and grace.
A clockmaker told me he had spent forty years not deciding whether to leave the city, and did not regret a single undecided hour.
Regret, he explained, belongs only to those enough to believe that any road, once taken, was ever truly the road.
Whichever life you choose, he said, you will spend the rest of it half-hearing the footsteps of the lives you refused.
The lamplight in that city was the colour of hesitation, a soft amber that seemed forever on the verge of deciding to be gold.
I passed a wedding that had been almost held, its guests still gathered, patient, in a chapel of almost.
Had they gone through with it, the bride confided, they would never have known the sweetness of remaining forever engaged.
Longing, in this city, was aimed neither forward nor back but sideways, toward the parallel selves living just beyond the wall of the actual.
I began to feel my own past soften, its firm events revealed as mere selections from a vaster of the possible.
Every memory, I saw, is only the sole survivor of a battle among countless things that might equally have happened.
The city's single monument was an empty pedestal, dedicated, its plaque read, to the statue they had never agreed to raise.
To stand before that emptiness was to feel the whole weight of everything the world had declined to become.
Yet the citizens were not unhappy; they had simply made peace with living inside the rather than the flat, closed past.
What if, they murmured to one another, as others say good morning, and the question was itself a kind of tenderness.
I stayed a week that could easily have been a lifetime, or been over in an afternoon, had I chosen to feel it so.
On leaving, I found that I could not decide which gate to use, and stood a long while savouring the rich paralysis.
The ghost of my other self walked me to the wall and, at the very threshold, quietly declined to follow.
Go, he said, and live the one life; I will stay here and keep all the others warm.
I walked out into the ordinary, decided world, and missed, already, the beautiful company of everything I would now never be.