Secondary Scenes

Sometimes I think she wants to stay, that she wants life to consist only of this, no more. It’s what I want. I want to make her desire a life here. I want to entangle her again in the world from which she fled, that she forced her story in order to lose herself in the conventions of a comfortable and supposedly happy life. I want to make her hate that placid future in Vermont. In short, I behave like an asshole.

It’s better to understand that time like one understands a brief summary in the TV guide: after twenty years, two childhood friends randomly reencounter each other and fall in love. But we aren’t friends. And there is no love, not really. We sleep together. We screw wonderfully well and I’ll never forget her dark, warm, firm body. But it isn’t love that unites us. Or it is love, but love of memory.

We are united by a desire to regain the scenes of secondary characters. Unnecessary scenes that were reasonably discarded, and which nonetheless we collect obsessively.”  —Alejandro Zambra, Ways of Going Home