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Richard Powers

Galatea 2. 2

The brain is wider than the sky,

For, put them side by side,

The one the other will contain

With ease, and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sea,

For, hold them, blue to blue,

The one the other will absorb,

As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,

For, heft them, pound for pound,

And they will differ, if they do,

As syllable from sound.

— EMILY DICKINSON

It was like so, but wasn't.

I lost my thirty-fifth year. We got separated in the confusion of a foreign city where the language was strange and the authorities hostile. It was my own fault. I'd told it, "Wait here. I'm just going to change some money. Check on our papers. Don't move from this spot, no matter what. " And chaos chose that moment to hit home.

My other years persist, like those strangers I still embrace in sleep, intimate in five minutes. Some years slip their chrysalis, leaving only a casing to hold their place in my sequence. Each year is a difficult love with whom I've played house, declaring, at each clock tick, what it will and won't put up with.

My thirty-fifth trusted no one. As soon as I said I'd only be a moment, it knew what would happen to us.

Thirty-five shamed me into seeing that I'd gotten everything until then hopelessly wrong. That I could not read even my own years.

At thirty-five, I slipped back into the States. I did not choose either move or destination. I was in no condition to choose anything. For lack of a plan, I took an offer in my old college haunt of U. The job was a plum, my premature reward for a portfolio that now seemed the work of someone else.

I thought the year a paid leave of absence. A visiting position, where I might start again with the recommended nothing.

House, meals, office, expenses, and no responsibilities except to live. I clung to the offer without too much reflection.

In fact, I had nowhere else to go. I couldn't even improvise a fallback.

It had to be U. U. was the only town I could still bear, the one spot in the atlas I'd already absorbed head-on. I'd long ago developed all the needed antibodies. When you take too many of your critical hits in one place, that place can no longer hurt you.

Nothing else remotely resembled home. Time had turned my birthplace into an exotic theme park. I could not have gotten a visa to live where I'd grown up. And I'd just spent the last seven years in a country that seemed exile already, even while I'd lived there.

But U. I could slink back to, and it would always take me. We were like an old married pair, at exhausted peace with each other. I did school's home stretch here, learned to decline and differentiate, program and compose. U. was where I took Professor Taylor's life-changing freshman seminar. Twelve years later, a stranger to the town, I passed through to watch Taylor die with horrific dignity.

U. was the place where I first saw how paint might encode politics, first heard how a sonata layered itself like a living hierarchy, first felt sentences cadence into engagement. I first put myself up inside the damp chamois of another person's body in U. First love smelted, sublimated, and vaporized here in four slight years.