I had seen her before.

I had seen her before.

I had seen her before we had shared that bench together that afternoon. Her music had swum out of the late evening shadows, many evenings ago, plucking me from my path home from work, only to re-place me within a dilapidated public auditorium. I had stood in the isles of that sparingly populated hall, watching her caress the fingerboard of her violin with one hand; weave an invisible tapestry with her bow in the other.

Her music that evening reminded me of an older man I had met whilst on a train journey across India some years ago. With passion and vigour, this fellow passenger had used his hands to accompany the few words of English that he knew, while watching me closely. Perhaps he had been waiting for me to show him that I had understood, and of course I hadn’t. He was determined to say something to me. It was as though he wanted so much to tell me, a stranger to him, something close and very personal to him. Something I wouldn’t now, ever know. And so listening to the music of the young violinist, that evening not too long ago, was much the same. I was there, in the moment, wanting and waiting, but it never came.

A tram going the other way had come and gone a few minutes before mine had arrived. The woman who had been sitting next to me, left with it, leaving the violinist with her violin case next to her on one side, and me with my desire to reach out to her, on the other.I noticed her glancing at her watch.

“Do you have the time?” I had asked.
“It’s almost six.” She had said, as she turned towards me. “But I could be wrong.”

I laughed. It had been a hollow, empty laugh. Forced.That evening that had passed not so long ago; she had spoken to me by plucking the strings of her violin and interchanging long notes with short ones. Hearing her voice then, was now something else. I turned to look at her once more, only to find her eyes searching my face. And that was when she smiled.She smiled. It was a loud invitation for a conversation, and an invitation that I turned down. So she was smiling, and I was struggling.I was struggling but I didn’t understand why.

I had spoken to strangers before. In fact I had often searched for them, and on finding them, I would stop and listen for an echo of their strangeness in the stories they had to tell. It was a way in which I would try to make sense of the same strangeness in my life, by reaching out for it in others. I had often spoken to strangers in the circumstances that had called for it. That is, circumstances that had brought on the birth and death, of relationships seeded by conversation.

There was Lara whose fiancé had left her. Beneath her act of apparent indifference to life, came a story thick with difference, love and affection. I had awoken to her sobbing late one night, and had sat up with her till morning. In broken sentences she described the feelings that she still had for the man she thought she would spend the rest of her life with. I was taken back that night to the stranger I had come across in Madras, who I simply hadn’t understood. It was only years later, amongst a series of encounters that I met another stranger, who helped me understand. It was through this stranger that I would finally feel Lara’s pain, and understand the loneliness that my affair with her would never have filled.

It was during the interval of a play one evening when Isabelle and I had shared a table. Two cups of coffee and the decision to miss the second half of Twelfth-Night had been the foreplay to one of those deep and meaningful conversations. The ones which tend to involve one individual’s personality, undressing, and standing naked in front of another. The conversation concluded with a long moment where I hadn’t an idea of what would come next. Love or at least some poorer version of it is what came, ending tragically three years, two states and one affair later.

Despite many of my previous attempts at chasing after what I had yet to experience, I hadn’t spoken to the young violinist that afternoon, just as I hadn’t spoken to the stranger in Madras, and just as I had and yet hadn’t spoken to Lara in her once unfamiliar, misery filled loneliness. I had wanted to speak to the young woman, who had seized my imagination with her music. I had wanted to reach out to her through her music and her strangeness. But the tram had come, and I had got on.

I got on with my curiosity un-fed. I got on, heavy with regret. I got on, with the certain knowledge that the slender fingers of time, were reaching out for me ahead, and before long, she would be just another memory.