Grief for What Never Was
在らざりしものへの哀悼
Some of my most tender memories are of things that, strictly speaking, never happened at all.
I grieve for a childhood by the sea that my landlocked, ordinary boyhood never actually granted me.
I can smell the salt and hear the gulls, though I first saw the ocean as a grown man.
The is real even where the remembered scene is pure invention, borrowed from books and old films.
If my father had been gentler, we would have walked those imaginary shores together at dusk.
He was not gentle, and the walks never occurred, yet I miss them with an ache sharper than fact.
This is the strangest of sorrows: to mourn a past that memory built entirely out of desire.
, we assume, looks back at what was; but often it gazes at what we merely wished had been.
The heart is a poor historian, forever smuggling its hopes into the archive it pretends to keep.
What I call remembering is sometimes only wanting, dressed in the sober costume of the past tense.
Had my life been the life I longed for, these scenes would be recollection rather than quiet fabrication.
But it was not, and so my paradise by the sea remains , a country with no coastline on earth.
I have wept over reunions that never took place, reconciliations my stubborn family never actually reached.
In memory I have forgiven, and been forgiven, in conversations that the real world never once allowed us.
Such phantoms are not lies I tell; they are wishes so old they have hardened into false remembrance.
The mind, unable to bear a particular absence, quietly manufactures the presence it was denied.
It is a and a trap at once, this gift for remembering the consolations we never received.
For the invented past can console, but it can also keep us mourning a loss that was never even real.
I have spent whole evenings for a home that existed only in the architecture of my .
And yet I hesitate to call these feelings false, for the that shaped them was entirely true.
The scenes are fiction; the hunger that composed them is the most honest fact about my whole life.
Perhaps every is partly this, a grief less for the past than for the selves we never became.
We miss not only what we lost but also what we were never once permitted to have.
I begin to make my peace with these phantoms, neither believing them nor casting them cruelly out.
They are the shape of my desire, and to know them is to know precisely where my heart still aches.
The imaginary sea tells me the truth my real childhood withheld: that I wished to be loved differently.
So I let the gulls cry on in a memory I know I invented, and I thank them for their honesty.
Tomorrow I shall try to write the real absence plainly, without the tender coastline I built to hide it.