The Myth of Closing Circles

“Since that walk, Daniela decided the bridge would be her private joke, her password. Every one of her boyfriends was taken to the bridge over the Mapocho, each one was made to believe he was the first to witness that private ceremony. This morning she remembers the last time she used the image with Ernesto, and she feels a desire to go to the bridge, alone, to throw something over the rail, into the current—a photograph, a hat, anything:  she thinks of the pure pleasure of seeing the object lost in the flow, and maybe she thinks, as well, of closing a circle, though she doesn’t believe in that myth of closing circles, of the culmination of a process. She believes, instead, that processes don’t exist, that the circles we are capable of seeing are never the right ones.” —Alejandro Zambra, The Private Life of Trees