There is a particular quality of light that belongs exclusively to the past.
Miriam had come to understand this slowly, the way one comes to understand most important things, which is to say reluctantly, and only after a great deal of unnecessary suffering. The light of memory, she had decided, possessed a warmth that no present afternoon could honestly replicate, a honeyed, amber-soaked luminosity that pooled in corners and gilded the edges of ordinary objects into something very nearly sacred.
She stood now at the window of a house that was technically her own and looked out upon a garden that was technically thriving. The roses were, by any objective horticultural measure, more robust than the ones her mother had kept. They were fuller, more insistently red, almost aggressive in their abundance. And yet they struck Miriam as pale imitations of a more essential roseness that existed nowhere she could presently locate.
This was the difficulty with longing, she reflected. It did not announce itself as nostalgia, which would have been manageable, even quaint. It arrived instead as a persistent and sourceless conviction that something of tremendous importance had been misplaced, something she could not name or adequately describe to anyone who might reasonably help her find it.
She had been twenty-three once, in a yellow kitchen, drinking coffee that was almost certainly terrible. There had been a radio playing something forgettable. Through the window, an unremarkable elm. Her roommate had been laughing about something, her head thrown back, her whole body committed to the laugh in a way that young bodies are, before they learn to hold anything in reserve.
Nothing of consequence had happened that morning. That was precisely the torment of it.
What she mourned was not the great events of her earlier years but the atmospheric texture of a Tuesday, the particular way boredom had felt when it was still uncomplicated, the sound of a screen door in a house she would never again enter, the lavender smell of a soap brand long since discontinued. These were not things one could grieve in polite company. They were not things one could grieve at all, technically, because they had not been lost so much as outgrown, superseded, dissolved by the relentless forward motion of a life proceeding in the only direction available to it.
The roses went on being red. The afternoon went on being luminous.
Miriam pressed one hand flat against the glass, feeling the sun through it, warm and terribly present, belonging entirely to now.
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