Like that is what I always say.

At a red light, I was in my car and singing, "The sun shines, leaves blow." The vehicle I pulled up next to was signalling to turn left. In it were a man and woman who I have not spoken to in a very long time. And when I noticed I stopped my car short. I was behind them enough that they could not see me. I wonder now if they would still have recognized me.

Some people are encased with fortune, where they spend their whole lives surrounded by a closeness shared with a few friends or family members or a lover. These are the ones that are cherished against all others they have met, while those others all pass along to gradually fade into the colour of past horizons. There are so many more people, countless ones, that have put their hands into your world, who have affected your days and decisions and your outlook, but whose direct participation in your history, their press upon the way your body shapes, becomes flattened out as you make new skin.

Most often the departures that occur between people are not coincident. The spirit of one still holds or builds while the other walks, perhaps down some path, perhaps in the midst of an enormous garden of trees between the mountains and the sea. Oppositely, maybe you are that figure that no longer occupies the moments of another, a statue landed among statues in the dark of an ocean. And now, you know, you have to learn to know that they do not spend any part of their days with any thought of their part of your history, or your part of theirs. All these figures in piles underwater, and by the time their decay floats upward they are specks without taste in your drink.

The last expression I shared with those two sitting beside me again, though in their own lane now, was a note placed at their door left shortly before dawn. It was a mixed thank you powdered with grievance, and tucked within the return of something borrowed.

They did not see me, I did not ask them to.

Given in its place.

Something amazing is how people can traverse the same spaces, but on completely separate planes of existence. This is a string of sunny afternoons, and I have been sitting on the porch with coffee, Pascal, and some books. And past my porch on this quiet street, a woman, tweaking, scurried along the sidewalk. She was sobbing into her cellphone and frantically twitching as if some ants were crawling all over her limbs. Separated by some number of feet were panic and peace.

Spaces evaporate for a moment when your eyes meet another's. They melt into the one small place outlined by your faces, the point of your shoes, the occasional movement between a hand and an arm. And you can share in a conversation, where you speak and hear all the very same words as another, but the flow and drift of those words in your place may not be the same as the person with whom you're sharing them. One may be speaking with a nervous admiration while the other listens, deep and warm but tired. Everyone may take the same walk through streets, but through the objects that make up its place they will spot and think of their own losses or hopes, pasts and futures. In everything, and from everything, there is mood and history that are not a part of spaces and words, but which can always arrive out of those things. This is that separation which bears the kinds of loneliness or security that people feel about themselves. To know someone is to feel in the objects around you the ways of meaning that another would impress upon them or derive from them. But, then, to know is only to wonder--whether that one also sees you in those things too, where knowledge and imagination carry each other.