The Map of Love

— and there, on the table under her bedroom window, lies the voice that has set her dreaming again. Fragments of a life lived a long, long time ago. Across a hundred years the woman’s voice speaks to her — so clearly that she cannot believe it is not possible to pick up her pen and answer. (first lines)

It can't be that bad. Surely it can't be that bad. There must be a way, only we can't see it yet. A way of making a space for ourselves where we can make the best of ourselves - we just can't quite see it yet. But things move on and by the time you've plotted your position the world around you has changed and you're running - panting to catch up. How can you think clearly when you're running? That is the beauty of the past; there it lies on the table: journals, pictures, a candle-glass, a few books of history. You leave it and come back to it and it waits for you - unchanged. You can turn back the pages, look again at the beginning. You can leaf forward and know the end. And you tell the story that they, the people who lived it, could only tell in part.

There have been those among us who have been so dazzled by the might and technological wizardy of Europe that they have been rather a man who stands lost in admiration at the gun that is raised to shoot him.

We always know how the story ends. What we don't know is what happens along the way.

“So. Tell me. What do you think? Which is better? To take action and perhaps make a fatal mistake - or to take no action and die slowly anyway?”

How can it strike so suddenly? Without warning, without preparation? Should it not grow on you, taking its time, so that when the moment comes when you think 'I love', you know or at least you imagine you know what it is you love? How can it be that a set of the shoulders, the rhythm of a stride, the shadow of a strand of hair falling on a forehead can cause the tides of the heart to ebb and to flow?

Put football instead of cricket and she could have been me. She could have been Arwa, or Deena or any of the girls I grew up with here in Cairo in the Sixties. What difference do a hundred years — or a continent — make?

It is that happy stretch of time when the lovers set to chronicling their passion. When no glance, no tone of voice is so fleeting but it shines with significance. When each moment, each perception is brought out with care, unfolded like a precious gem from its layers of the softest tissue paper and laid in front of the beloved — turned this way and that, examined, considered. And so they sit, and touch, and talk, and breathe, and so they string their moments into a glorious chain, and throw it round each other's necks, garland each other with it. Invisible to all others, it shines for them, a beacon across a crowded room, across an ocean, across time.

“If people can write to each other across space, why can they not write across time too?”

“Sometimes I think, because we use the same words, we assume we mean the same thing”