The lights blinked twice and went out. I strapped the safety belt on, conscious of the blinking lights, conscious, too, of the cry of the toddler several rows back. A long flight, with no end in sight.
Next to me on the plane sat my creative writing instructor, a woman roughly the age of my mother. She is a writer of some renown, owed in equal parts by the fame she has found for renovating notions of character, and by the infamy she had been subject to for her frank, uncensored—what some would call selfish—account of her messy divorce with the father of her children. This story she told in a well-known novel from 2012.
We kept our silence over the duration of the lift-off, for no other reason than for the fact that neither of us had much to say. Now she took a deep breath and addressed me. “These last few months have been a time of transition for me.” A time of change, she adds, makes you conscious of nothing so much as the process of transformation itself. Everywhere she looked, she saw men and women struggle through one transition or another. Old lovers, friends, odious neighbors, acquaintances – everyone is transitioning, either through periods defined visibly through outside factors; or through internalised ones, at work in everything we touch, everything that touches us.
What drives it? She considered, looking down the aisle at the air hostess awhirl with activity. Just when I thought to call her attention again, my teacher’s voice picked up once more. ”It’s motion, and it’s static, this constant of ours.” Like with so much else, she said, change is defined by how we embrace it; through acts of will or surrender. Viewing the act of change like this offers you a good stage to talk about evil and love and parenthood, she said, and loneliness, and of so much more that goes into the human condition. She stopped, gaze narrowing, as if she were fast forwarding through what she just said. “An acquaintance of mine told me recently, ‘Loneliness is when nothing will stick to you, when nothing will thrive around you, when you start to think that you kill things just by being there.’”
But how does that connect to change, I asked. It leaves a mark, she told me, the kind that doesn’t come out with a bit of soap and a long soak. It shapes your thoughts and changes your inner self, and creates distance that’s difficult to overcome.
I thought I knew what she meant, I told her. I’d been lonely, myself. Was lonely, still—now and again.
She said, “We don’t even realise it. It dawns on us only once we turn around and look back. Something a friend told me struck a note with me. ‘It’s strange,’ he said, ‘that you always changed everything and I changed nothing and yet we’ve both ended up in the same place.’ That’s how this silent, all-encompassing process works. You might have only caught glimpses of it this far, you’re—what, twenty-five?”
“In August.”
“You have noticed then, how people enter your life seamlessly, without flaw—and exit in much the same vein. You won’t be surprised to learn that sometimes, they come back. And sometimes, you’ll pick up where you left off, as if no time has passed at all, and no matter how much either of you has changed, you’ll find…it doesn’t matter at all. Does that negate the transition in the first place? “
I nod.
She curved her lips upwards as she told me, “It’s the way of change.” It’s not a one-way street, she said, this transformation of ours. At the right time, with the right person, time flows backwards, and you again return to that twenty-something year old, or that little girl. or boy.
She spoke for a long time, and I listened to all she said, and lost myself. The words she said were rarely about herself, but rather about the world as she saw it, and the people whose words helped her see it the way she did. My teacher had an understanding of human nature like few others I’d known. To immerse myself in her words was to catch a glimpse of that understanding, take possession of it—however fleeting. I was envious and almost lustful of that knowledge; the more she spoke, the more I wished to hear.
After the plane landed but before the seatbelt lights went off, I turned to her. She’d grown silent for the duration of the landing, once more withdrawing into herself.
“Thank you, Faye,” I told her. “Your guidance is invaluable. I think…much of what you’ve told me today will leave its mark for a long time to come.”
She nodded, her face serious. “I’m glad of it. But I’m curious – what do you think?”
I attempted to mimic Cusk’s style in this mixture between a review and an essay – I hope you’ve enjoyed the results. Some of the words I inserted into her mouth are direct quotes from the novel – I’ll leave it to you to judge which ones!
