The grey area

 There is a titillating pleasure in looking back at the past and asking oneself, ‘What would have happened if…’ observing how, from a gray, barren, humdrum moment in one’s life, there grows a marvelous rosy event that in reality had failed to flower. One regards this thought-tendril, this subtler style of regret, with a kind of retrospective amusement, and then experiences a pang — not so much of pain as of a hot, melting pity for oneself and for what one once was.

Vladimir Nabokov

The Rosy That Never Bloomed

Permit me a brief indulgence, a small, well-polished seed I have long kept in the velvet drawer of the mind. You see, I am occasionally visited by a peculiar ghost. No rattling chains, no transparent wails, nothing vulgar. This specter is subtler, fragrant, and well-read. It smells of burnt lilac and old typewriter ribbon. It visits only when one is alone and the tea has cooled, and it leans, breathlessly, from behind the drapes of memory.

It speaks in conditional tenses.

There was a Tuesday, a drab, damp, aggressively uneventful Tuesday, in a bookshop that no longer exists. I remember the light was pale, the spines were dusty, and the air had that timid perfume of yellowed pages and rain-soaked wool. I had gone in to buy an eraser, something discreet to correct an error in a letter I would never send.

And there, between the ‘Maeterlinck’ and the ‘Mann,’ was a man with a broken umbrella and the posture of a forgotten violinist. His hair was the exact hue of unlit honey. I recall this with pathological precision, because, naturally, we never spoke. I adjusted my collar. He adjusted his silence. He looked at a copy of Speak, Memory, and I, traitor to my own occasion, reached for The Magic Mountain, which, in hindsight, was an act of cowardice wrapped in high-brow packaging.

Had I said something, not profound, not poetic, merely sufficient — then what? Would he have turned with the violence of recognition? Would he have smiled that hypothetical smile which, even now, eclipses all actual smiles received since? Would we have walked out together, into the symphony of dripping city, beneath the indecently large umbrella I kept folded in my satchel for no reason at all?

You see how the branch bends toward blossom. You see how the gray moment blushes.

And it is here, precisely here, where the ghost whispers, “But you did not.” And then I feel, not remorse, no, but something tenderer and more baroque — a pang wrapped in brocade. One grieves not the event but the vacancy it left in one’s private myth.

Retrospective pity, Nabokov calls it, and he is right. It is the most literary form of pain. It leaves no scar. Only style.

So I ask you, dear reader:

What rosy event never flowered in your life, and what gray, humdrum moment did you dress in perfume and velvet in the theater of your mind?

Olesia Alexandrovna Manakova