More and more, there come evenings that arrive without announcement, and yet one knows, almost before the first shadow has lengthened across the room, that something has come to collect a sort of debt I am yet to truly comprehend. It asks of me no money, nor does it desire an apology. It merely sits beside me, aloofly patient, until one by one the dead begin to assemble.
They are not the dead whom priests commend to God, nor those whom physicians certify beyond recall. They are another kind altogether. I can tell many tales of their organization and might. For I am quite familiar with their history, in the long past when we were inseparable. The dead I speak of are not reminiscent of people, but of moments that have quietly ceased to exist, though the heart, stubborn creature that it is, has long repudiated any attempt to acknowledge their passing.
What an extraordinary deception memory so often proves to be. It does not preserve the years, not really, only dissolves them a little, then plays upon me so cruelly and so wittily that twelve years become a single afternoon. I am no weakling and may have very well been victorious in unraveling its sardonic prank, but I had no courage to assume my stance. And before I could will to defend myself against the trick, I was no longer here, but there, no longer twenty-nine, but seventeen, no longer this man who has learned too much of endings, but a ludicrous boy bewildered by all the novelties. I am taken back, without an iota of protest, to Amman as it was in 2014.
The city itself has doubtless continued its patient existence, indifferent to my sentimentality. The hills remain where they once were, the streets still climb and descend with the same obstinacy, and the evening still gathers upon the windows with that old familiar tenderness. Somewhere, surely, a taxi driver complains of traffic precisely as he did then. Overthere, too, stands a neighbor threatening to slice the ball’s neck should it dare bounce upon his sacred ground. It is not the city that has vanished, for the city seems to have survived me. It is the hour that has vanished, and in spite of how often memory kidnaps me and carries me back to those scenes, I have always found it impossible to return to that hour.
One imagines, foolishly, that if he could stand once more upon those familiar pavements, if only for five minutes, everything would be restored. Yet what would he discover, except that the pavement remembers nothing? What sort of stone possesses nostalgia? It had once carried the feet of an unsuspecting child, and now it carries those of strangers. The city has forgotten him far more completely than he has forgotten it.
How curious that the soul should attach itself to such absurd things. A city. A football crossing a field. A wrestling entrance. A controller vibrating in one’s hands. Coloured frames flickering upon a television screen whilst impossible warriors screamed their defiance against annihilation. By every rational measure, these ought to have been trifles, diversions fit only to occupy idle hours. Yet I suspect our greatest error lies precisely there. We imagine that life is constructed from its monumental occasions, whilst in truth it is stitched together from innumerable fragments so insignificant that even a bored historian would find no fitting reason to record them.
But I remember, and perhaps that is why I suffer.
Another remembrance claims my name. I see the same young boys seated impatiently on modest chairs before a grand screen. A bet between two passionate hearts seems to dull out the sound of their surroundings as their eyes keenly await the promised match between Messi and Ronaldo. I pity their innocent souls believing with the certainty peculiar to youth that there would always be another match. How impossible it seemed that these stars should age. I too then had been fooled into believing they belonged to that rare class of beings exempt from ordinary laws, as though one might expect the seasons to perish before they did. Just now the moment fades and I see today that Messi tightens his boots more slowly, Ronaldo smiles a little more wistfully, and the ball, indifferent as ever, continues to roll toward younger feet whose names I find so hard to remember.
Then, the boys waved goodbye. But some had betrayed their bedtimes for they had other stars to cheer. That night, a pirated video of Monday Night Raw just happened to find its way into their slumbering parents’ laptops. They watched The Undertaker walk proudly to the ring so many times that the tolling of a bell became indistinguishable from the anticipation of wonder itself. Triple H’s music erupted, and for a few seconds the world obeyed laws more satisfying than reality ever could. Who cared, or even dared to care, that wrestling was scripted? I heard the glass shatter and believed Stone Cold himself might walk into the world and correct its injustices by force. I saw Kane emerge from fire. I saw Lesnar appear less a man than a mythical beast. I cheered Cena as he survived impossibilities that would have buried lesser myths. Looking back now, I realise that I was not merely watching performers, I was witnessing permanence, or so I believed. How naive I was, for nothing has proved less permanent than permanence.
Then there were quieter evenings. The night, conscious to the tragedy not too far ahead granted its tears freedom for what’s about to become of that little boy. There, the wise parents decreed that the soon to be men are to remain in doors fearing the rain might complicate their strides. “No problem” and at once an alien looking console hummed tirelessly in the corner of a room. Its owner seldom found any need to grant it rest, though he cursed the familiar loading screen with the indignation of one betrayed by an old friend. Oh I remember, I desired only a quick match on Dome, perhaps, or Nuketown. Honestly? Nothing extraordinary occurred. Soon the match became two, then three, then many. One lost, one won, and someone shouted through a headset so loudly that I feared he would wake my father, and another promised revenge in the next round claiming they lagged as they were about to quickscope their prey. At the time, those hours seemed almost embarrassingly ordinary. Had anyone suggested they would one day become sacred relics, I should have laughed.
Yet tell me honestly, what treasure would purchase back a single unremarkable evening with those who have long since stopped logging in?
Even the stories that never belonged to our world somehow became part of our own. I waited, as so many did, for Vegeta to stand where he believed he ought always to have stood. It scarcely mattered whether he surpassed Goku, for I had come to relish the waiting itself, and the waiting had become a companion. Alas, Toriyama rested his pencil before the prince could receive the justice I had imagined for him. Perhaps the adult only thinks he is pursuing conclusions, when what truly nourishes him is expectation. Childhood is nothing if it is not the conviction that tomorrow still contains undiscovered marvels.
Now I remember myself as I am.
I am twenty-nine years old, and a strange alteration has taken place within me. I had once measured time by what was approaching, by summer holidays, by new games, by the next tournament, the next chapter, the next impossible comeback. Today I find myself measuring it by what has quietly disappeared, by another retirement, another farewell, another stadium applauding a man who once seemed incapable of growing old.
Is this melancholy? Perhaps it is. Yet I hesitate to condemn it entirely, since there is something profoundly honourable in mourning the passage of one’s own life before it concludes, as the lives of his heroes concluded before him, and as the lives of their heroes concluded before them. For only that which has been genuinely loved can leave behind such silence.
As I watch this film of my own history I gather that the greatest cruelty of my existence, of any existence, lies in never knowing when something is happening for the final time. There is a last afternoon in one’s childhood, a last match played with old friends, a final drive through a familiar neighbourhood before life, already conspiring in silence, carries everyone elsewhere by morning. The tragedy is that these endings do not announce themselves as endings. They disguise themselves, with almost demonic modesty, as ordinary Thursdays.
I only wish the evenings understood that irrespective of my desire, such moments cannot be revisited. The road has long since closed behind us. Yet neither have they been extinguished. They persist in the only kingdom where time itself admits defeat, within memory, imperfect, unreliable, forever rearranging its own furniture, and yet faithful enough that, on certain evenings, one can almost see the familiar shadows sitting impatiently as we await the arrival of the “five minutes and I will be ready” once more, almost hear the opening note of an entrance theme, almost feel the controller in his hands, almost believe that somewhere beyond the next hill lies the Amman of 2014, patiently waiting for a boy who is that no longer.
Dr.MOG 
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