What this is, and what it is not

You are in the car with the engine off. You got here early, and you have not gone in yet.

It is one of the few places where nobody wants anything, so it is one of the places where she turns up — her face, that year, the question she kept asking and the way you answered it the fourth time.

That going over is the one thing left that takes it seriously. Everybody else has stopped. Nothing in this chapter is asking you to stop, and nothing in the ones after it will either.

The chapters after this describe things people do. Before any of them, it is worth being exact about what is being talked about, because the words usually used for it are wrong, and if you think that is what is meant you will reasonably want no part of it.

It is not forgetting. Nothing here helps anybody forget anything, and it would not be a kindness if it did.

It is not forgiving yourself. That would be a verdict, and a verdict is what has been keeping you up. Nothing in this book hands down a finding in your favour.

It is not deciding it was all right. It was not all right. You were short with her when she was frightened and you left the room. That stands, in full, and nothing after this reduces it by a word.

It is not getting over her, and it is not moving on, and it is not acceptance, and it is not closure. Those are other people's words and most of them are said by people who want the subject changed.

And it is not a substitute for anything still owed. If somebody in this is alive, what has never been said can still be said, and it can be said this week. Nothing in a parked car settles that.

What is left, once all of those are out, is narrower than any of them, and it is the only thing these chapters are about.

There is what happened. And there is the part you add afterwards — the summing up, the verdict, the small sentence about what sort of man that makes you, delivered nightly by you, to nobody.

Only the second one is being talked about. The first is untouched, and so is she, and so is every hour you have spent going over it.

One thing before the rest.

If what you carry is what somebody did to you, that is chapter 17, and nothing in this one asks anybody to let go of anything.

Now the part that matters most, and the one most books in this line leave out.

It comes back.

Whatever is done in any of the chapters that follow, it comes back — that night, or the next week, or in eight months when something on the television brings it. That is not a sign that it did not work, and it is not evidence that you did it wrong, and it is certainly not a reason to start again from the beginning.

Its coming back does not put you back on trial.

That is the whole of the claim being made in this part of the book. Not that any of it goes away. Only that when it arrives, you are not required to sit through the summing up as well.

And nothing is required tonight.

What follows describes what some people do. None of it is homework, there is no order to it, and a person who reads all four chapters and does none of it has not failed at anything — a book is not owed a performance.

You came here early. In a minute you will go in, and whatever you came for will happen, and she will still be with you when you come out.

That part was never in question.