You arrived, not like a proclamation, but like dusk — unhurried, already half-formed before I noticed. No preamble, no need for announcement. Only a glance, and I knew. You had crossed a city, perhaps more than one, but the greater distance you covered was time — the kind of time that accumulates in silences and postponed letters, in the moments we almost made and never did. And now you were here.

I do not recall what we said at first. The words themselves, brittle things, lost like dry leaves in the wind. But I remember the timbre of your voice, the way you looked at the shelves I’d been filling with jars, as if what I had been preserving all along was not fruit, not butter, not sugar—but a life. A string of days we once imagined would converge more often, but had quietly learned to live apart.

And still, here you stood. Not to revisit the past, not even to congratulate the present. You came simply to be near. That was enough.

There is something unbearable in a visit like yours—something too kind, too gentle, too honest to survive in the heat of daily life. We sat at the edge of what could have been a thousand different lives, and we did not speak of them. Perhaps we didn’t need to. The afternoon passed like water, all light and shadows, and our talk moved like people wading in a river neither of us owned.

I watched you then, not with the eyes of a host, but of a witness. I saw in you the ghost of a youth that still lived in me—the hunger to do something worthy of memory, the tremble of someone who once wanted to create beauty, not because the world needed it, but because we did. I remembered when I first walked with Mervyn, not toward a goal, but into a fog where only instinct and care could guide us. Our path still has no markers, but it has warmth. It has weight.

We made tea. You tasted our plum preserve. There was no grand declaration. But I saw something flicker in your expression, that slow recognition that perhaps the things we used to chase have already arrived, only quieter than we expected.

And yet, as always, the day begins to recede even as it begins. You stood again. A glance at your phone. The sun lowering itself with an almost guilty reluctance. You said goodbye, but I heard the pause behind it—the unspoken words we’ve all had to swallow as we part. That longing not just to be remembered, but to be remembered rightly, as we are now: unfinished, still searching, still soft where it counts.

Later that evening, I came across the article you had been reading earlier. I didn’t remember the headline, but I remembered the feeling it stirred. There was something in it that made me think of you—of the quiet weight of moments like this, of the passing of time and the preservation of fleeting things.

I lit my pipe. Not out of ritual, but out of need. I needed to mark that you had been here. That you had brought with you something I had quietly missed: the proof that even in our solitude, we are seen. That even the most private of kitchens might someday be remembered as a sanctuary, because someone we loved once crossed its threshold and smiled.

If I could speak beyond the limitations of speech, I would tell you that your visit became a part of us. That you did not merely witness our work—you became its reason. That we do not preserve just to bottle up what is perishable, but to touch, however briefly, what endures.

And when you boarded that flight back home, when you vanished into that city of lights and oblivion—I hope you felt, as I did, the quiet insistence of something sacred. Something held, if only for a moment, within the slow rhythm of our hours.

We may never speak of it again. But it lives.

30th April 2025