The girl was already there when I got on the bus. She moved aside to make a space for my story, but I shrugged my shoulders: I had brought nothing with me – not even a knapsack – with which to fill it. The bus moved away again; leaves were scraping against the window; an hour had passed; half-asleep, she snuggled against my shoulder, and the street lamps went by without division. Beyond them, houses we would never see again guttered away in their thin, level light. Were we here at all? Or perhaps the question was: What is here? Can this here be had? If we pause here, the claim we stake is not to a place, but to an interim; the allegiance we swear is to the spaces between things, spaces which are bound by things only to prevent something – nothing – taking their place.

With a hiss the bus drew to a halt. Somnabular and detached, the passengers moved slowly along the aisle, pausing in silhouette upon the steps. The seat was empty, but beyond the window, the side of her head balanced between two trees. The night air had that familiar, inconclusive smell of rain, and, here in particular, the scent lingered without affirmation, hearkening back to an indeterminate past the best days of which have already been forgotten. Kneeling before her, I breathed in the darkness of her body, that smelled of horses’ saddles and smudged stars and pieces of old lace; I was thinking of the shadows on the grass, and the grey, uncertain dawn to follow. Then suddenly, as the wind caught us, I felt the great weight of the world, the great lightness of the world, in this moment in which everything is beginning and ending, in this moment which, like every other, is predestined and cannot be found again.

Now we were in the market square; all about us, like pieces of a world, people were moving. We made some arrangement. I started to walk across the square. Fifteen years passed by. At last I reached the office, ascended the steps and moved across the room. I sat down, turned about, and then, very deliberately, raised my head above the screen. Her face had a sharpness, a reality to it that seemed to limit its potential; it belonged neither to the night nor the past, but to something else which I hesitate to call a future.

As a place carved out of nowhere, like a stone without a setting, where all the houses are the same, and nothing begins or ends; as a space without hope or memory, that can neither threaten nor comfort us: our names mean nothing here, and our meanings mean nothing, either; it is simply as phenomena that we colour the world about us, and then, an instant after, we are our own colours, and the world unseams its skirts, and, like a tide, the orders of things reverse.