The one who has been looking

You are at the mirror, and it still does not look like you.

Nearly everybody your age says some version of that, and hardly anybody says it out loud, because said out loud it sounds foolish. The face is correct. It is the right age, there is nothing wrong with it, and it is not what you expect, and it has not been what you expect for about thirty years.

There is something in that, and it is the whole of this chapter.

Nothing here asks you to believe anything, and there is nothing in it to do. It is one observation, it is already yours, and it is the only thing in this book you can check for yourself before the end of the page.

And none of it is a reason to go without care. A dated body in pain is in pain: the pain goes to the doctor this week, and so does the sleeping. So does a memory that has started to slip. If names are going that did not used to go, that is for the doctor sooner rather than later — some of what takes a memory is treatable, and it gets missed because everybody assumes it is the age.

Everything about you has turned over.

The handwriting changed, the voice changed, the opinions changed, some of them twice. What you wanted at thirty would not satisfy you now, and what frightened you at fifty does not frighten you at all. The face in front of you has been replaced so thoroughly that a photograph of it at nineteen would not get you through an airport.

And the one looking at it has not moved.

That is the whole of it. Not that you feel young — you do not, and this is not a chapter about feeling young. It is narrower and stranger than that. Somewhere back there is a morning when you stood at a window and looked out at something, and you were small, and you have no idea now what you were looking at or why it stayed. When that comes back to you, you are not remembering somebody else. Nowhere in the whole run of it did the looking change hands.

Everything about you that can be dated has a date. The looking does not appear to have one.

Some people call that the soul, and have an account of where it was before this and where it goes afterwards. This book is not going to hand you one, and nothing here needs it. If you have a faith, the observation sits inside what you already hold. If you have none, it is unchanged: whatever you want to call what has been going on behind your eyes since you were small, it was there, and it did not get older.

And the looking has never been tired.

You are. You are tired in the way people in their forties use the word for something else entirely. Tired of the stairs. Tired of the nights. Tired of being the one who still remembers, which nobody has offered to take over. None of that is overstated and nothing here subtracts a gram of it. But you have been tired for years and you have never once been tired of looking. It went on at the same rate underneath all of it, on the worst days as much as the others.

And it is not a reason to go.

Everything checkable in this chapter is checkable because it is happening, now, while you are alive to do it. Turned into a claim about afterwards it stops being an observation and becomes somebody's belief — and this chapter has just declined to hand you one, which leaves it in no position to tell you anything would be waiting. Nothing here describes dying. It is a remark about being alive, made while you are, and it will not carry the weight of that decision.

It is not a defence, either. This was just as true on the worst day of your life. It was true while you were doing the thing. It did not improve you then and it does not acquit you now, and something that holds on every day without exception is exactly the sort of thing that cannot be evidence about any particular one.

And it is not a refuge. It never protected you from anything; it has no walls. It was going on through every one of the bad nights, not above them, and nothing here is offering you a place to stand back and watch your own life from. People who find that place become unreachable, and that is not what is being described. You still want the telephone to ring. You would still rather somebody came on Sunday. Whatever peace is going about the life that happened, there is none of it going spare for the call you could still make this week.

One more, for whoever needs it tonight.

If the memory has begun to go — if there are names now that will not come, or the family tell you a version of something and you cannot find it anywhere — none of this rests on your account of yourself being reliable. It is not made out of what you can recall. Whatever you can or cannot bring back this evening, the looking is going on while you try.

And nothing here makes the dated things smaller. The one you lost had a date on her, and that was not a demotion. It is most of what made her herself, that particular woman and no other, in those particular years. The one who has been looking is also the one who loved her, and is still doing it, and has not got tired of that either.

There is nothing to be done with any of this. It is not a practice, and it is not a reward for having got somewhere. It was true before you opened the book. It was true on the worst night of the last ten years. It would be just as true this evening if you had put nothing down at all, and if you never put anything down, it will be true in the morning.

Put the light out over the mirror. It has been going on the whole time, and it does not need you to agree with it.