Leitmotifs Don't Really Exist

Dear K,
Whoever told you to stay? For that matter who told you to go? I know I told you both, but we both know you shouldn't listen to me when it comes to these things called decisions. I've been reading a lot of Marquez lately, ridiculous amounts. I read Love In The Time Of Cholera twice, and I'm almost through 100 Years Of Solitude for the fourth time this year, not to mention the collection of short stories that I stole from a friend three years ago. I read that last week.

I've been waiting for this job to start, and everyday when I put down the book by Marquez, I go and look in the mirror. I think maybe I'll see myself grow old before my own eyes, because the books and the waiting and the trembling thoughts about being a taxpayer and a job holder and that gleaming stainless steel future that awaits beyond make me feel as if my youth is a rope or sand running through my fingers, and in my mind I'm grabbing and holding the rope made of sand but gripping around it won't work and it seems as if the time is almost up.

We're talking as if we've already settled into the antiseptic beds of the last hospital we'll visit. As if the phantoms of our failures and successes and our loves and losses are already surrounding our death bed.

I found something out though, we have a common problem. We've read too many books and we've seen too many movies, and probably the worst part is, we've written too many stories. The thing I found out is that we're not characters in a book or a film or even in the New Yorker. It is a trick of memory that makes us think so. Do you know what this means? It means anything can happen to you and it doesn't have to mean anything, but it can if you want it to, and you can really do whatever you want, because there's no giant author there up in the sky deciding what you do.

I'm writing, and soon I'll be out there in the world, living again, and I'll sweep away all these waves of disappointment and displacement. Why are you mourning for a past that hasn't happened yet? Whoever said you couldn't change your mind?

Regards,
K