Pivot

“Go where it ended, and begin there.” I wasn’t sure what I would think as the subway neared Harvard Yard. In fact, I didn’t really give much thought to thinking anything at all. So I was surprised when I began to feel a little queasy, an incipient shiver thrusting up from my midsection someplace.I looked at the windows, rushing past long dark stretches of tunnel wall, slowing as we took the final curve. Was this to be nothing more than a wasteful conceit? Two days later, to a visiting music professor from England, I would respond, “Unfinished business,” to his question of why I was coming back. But could unfinished business truly justify resuming a part of my life that had seen me convinced I'd lost my place and my path? Perhaps it was just me trying to live as though I were a character in a storybook. Sasha might have said that to me, once. But now Sasha seemed supportive. We’ve both changed since the days when he was from South Africa and I could get drunk off the Beauty and the Beast soundtrack.

The subway halted. I emerged.

The shiver never quite manifested, and I passed through the turnstiles to face the first choice of the day. Left, to Harvard Yard and yesterday. Or, right, to C’est Bon, breakfast and, presumably, the future.That’s when the phrase took me by surprise.

Go back to where it ended, and start there.

Signal a new direction by commencing where the old one failed. Two rays can share the same terminus and journey different ways. One ray emerged from Canaday A-13 in May 1995 and made it to a taxi cab in Harvard Square. From there, it took me to Chile, to Stanford, to CASIO and Dr. Hurlbut, to Albania and Kosovo. It was a good ray, despite its inauspicious beginning.

This one would start in the same place again but go somewhere else. I exited left.