A Note

I passed by the house of an old friend last night, and sat on her veranda drinking some rum and coke. As I am writing this in Oasis, a Norah Jones album is playing, which was the soundtrack sort for the affair we almost had, this woman 12 years older than I am, and "possessed still of a girlish laughter" and a sadness that she masks with various passions of which I was briefly one.

Watching her last night, I couldn't help but notice how her beauty increased with age, as if nurtured by the melancholy which takes her over increasingly from time. There is a section of Derek Walcott's Another Life, which you can find here, a reminiscence of his long lost love affair with, a part of which reads:

a man lives half of life,
the second half is memory,

the first half, hesitation
for what should have happened
but could not, or

what happened with others
when it should not.

In retrospect, fidelity can appear, under certain circumstances, as a moral blunder.