The Opposite of Nostalgia

You are running away from everyone who loves you, from your family, from old lovers, from friends. They run after you with accumulations of a former life, copper earrings, plates of noodles, banners of many lost revolutions. You love to say the trees are naked now because it never happens in your country. This is a mystery from which you will never recover. And yes, the trees are naked now, everything that still breathes in them lies silent and stark and waiting. You love October most of all, how there is no word for so much splendor. This, too, is a source of consolation. Between you and memory everything is water. Names of the dead, or saints, or history. There is a realm in which —no, forget it, it’s still too early to make anyone understand. A man drives a stake through his own heart and afterwards the opposite of nostalgia begins to make sense: he stops raking the leaves and the leaves take over and again he has learned to let go.