Bargains with No Counterparty
相手のいない取引
After the anger came the , though I could never identify the party with whom I imagined myself to bargain.
If I had called the doctor a week earlier, she would still be here; that sentence ran through my head like a .
If I had insisted, if I had noticed, if I had been less absorbed in my work, then, then what, precisely?
The conditional mood, which I had taught to students for decades, now closed around me like a trap of my own grammar.
Had I only known, I would have done everything differently, but I did not know, and no amount of grammar rewrites the past.
Still I bargained, offering the empty air my future in exchange for a revision of what could not be revised.
Take my remaining years, I proposed to no one; take my health, my work, my name, only give me back one ordinary Tuesday.
The trouble with a bargain is that it requires a counterparty, and death, that silent merchant, never once came to the table.
I was negotiating with an absence, laying my terms before a vacancy, awaiting a reply that could not, by its very nature, arrive.
If she were here, she would tell me that guilt is a way of pretending we had more control than we ever truly did.
And if I could believe her, I would be free; but belief, in grief, is not a thing that one can simply decide to hold.
So I performed small, secret penances, absurd and private, as though suffering now might purchase forgiveness for suffering too little then.
I ate her least favourite meals; I walked the long way, in the cold, without a coat, inviting a punishment no court had ordered.
Each act was a coin dropped into a slot that led nowhere, a prayer posted to an address that had long since been demolished.
The counterfactuals multiplied like weeds: a different city, a different decade, a different and more attentive version of myself.
In every imagined variant she survived, and in every variant her survival hinged upon some I had failed to supply.
I understand now that this arithmetic is , for the mind, hunting a , will always convict the one who is still alive.
Guilt flatters us with a terrible power; it insists that, had we been wiser, we might have outvoted itself.
But does not stand for election, and no ballot of ours was ever going to alter its ancient, indifferent result.
Marta did not die because I failed; she died because she was mortal, as I am, as everyone I love must one day be.
To say this plainly is not ; it is merely the truth, and the truth, at first, feels colder than the guilt.
For guilt, at least, offered agency, and agency, however painful, is warmer than the vast indifference of pure chance.
I clung to my responsibility because responsibility implied a world in which such losses could, in principle, be prevented.
To let that go meant accepting a universe in which love guarantees nothing and , in the end, saves no one.
My , then, was never truly with death; it was with a reality I was not yet remotely prepared to .
Slowly the offers dwindled, the penances tired me, and the counterparty never came, for one cannot barter forever with an empty chair.
When the last bargain fell silent, what remained was not peace but a heavy, colourless quiet, like a room after the guests have gone.
And into that quiet, uninvited, the greyness began to descend, and for a while I would stop reaching, stop pleading, stop almost everything.