A Month in The Country

"We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours for ever--the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.

All this happened so long ago. And I never returned, never wrote, never met anyone who might have given me news of Oxgodby. So, in memory, it stays as I left it, a sealed room furnished by the past, airless, still, ink long dry on a put-down pen.

But this was something I knew nothing of as I closed the gate and set off across the meadow."

The last few poignant paragraphs of A Month in The Country by J. L. Carr.

Memory is a funny thing. I think I too often get caught up wondering or worrying about the way I'll look back on things. It's not the future exactly which sways my decisions, but more fear or hope of the way I'll remember myself and my choices and motives...though I suppose that self we leave behind is always an elusive stranger, romantic, mysterious and enchanting.