The cathedral in Malaga is called La Manquita because one of its two towers was not finished. The time – the days, the weeks – that I lived there I knew all that but it didn't matter. It was just a cathedral that, when money ran out, one of its towers could not be finished. The other day I returned to Malaga and saw that the cathedral was missing a hand or part of an arm and I was overcome with grief. I no longer spend time there – days, weeks – and, perhaps for that reason, the hands that are not there matter.
We only see things that were and are no longer, just as we can only remember what is forgotten. There is a lost world of things that were and meant and a world that has not yet arrived. And during that interval, you know, the monsters in the streets. Only when you get older do you realize the things that you always lacked. That you didn't have a hand or an arm and that's why you dropped the things that you thought you could grab and hold tightly. You don't have to be a house to house ghosts, Emily Dickinson wrote, but it helps at least to understand the insomnia of hotel beds in cities where you slept at home. The things we are missing.
The words that meant things. The people who said them. The promises that were kept and that were not forgotten. The missed opportunities. The streets that catch fire in other cities. The repeated elections, the betrayals and the broken promises. The story that rhymes, the phone numbers that are not remembered. The things you said, the people who aren't there. The cathedrals that are not finished, the lights on on the nightstands when you fell asleep and believed that the world was in order and that there would be no more wars and everyone would have what they deserved. All those things that we miss today. End up killing all the dead and let's go back to what we do, to forget about all the things we lack.
