Crouch Blake

No one tells you it’s all about to change, to be taken away. There’s no proximity alert, no indication that you’re standing on the precipice. And maybe that’s what makes tragedy so tragic. Not just what happens, but how it happens: a sucker punch that comes at you out of nowhere, when you’re least expecting it. No time to flinch or brace.

For anyone who has wondered what their life might look like at the end of the road not taken.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened.

—T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.

“Quantum mechanics. Intro stuff mainly. Nothing too terribly sexy.”

“Just a question, but do you see yourself more as a research scientist or a teacher these days?”

Now, if the people around me”—he gestures at his students who have begun to crowd in—“are sharp enough to absorb knowledge by sheer proximity to me…great. But the passing on of knowledge, as it were, doesn’t interest me. All that matters is the science. The research.”

It’s the beautiful thing about youth.

There’s a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential.

He says to me, almost like a confession, “It’s been a long road. I can’t quite believe I’m sitting here actually looking at you. Talking to you. I know you don’t understand, but there’s so much I want to ask.”

“About what?”

“What it’s like to be you.”

“What do you mean?”

He hesitates, then: “How do you feel about your place in the world, Jason?”

I say slowly, deliberately, “That’s an interesting question considering the night you’ve put me through.”

“Are you happy in your life?”

“My life is great. It’s just not exceptional. And there was a time when it could have been.”

“You killed your ambition, didn’t you?”

“It died of natural causes. Of neglect.”

“And do you know exactly how that happened? Was there a moment when—?”

“My son. I was twenty-seven years old, and Daniela and I had been together a few months. She told me she was pregnant. We were having fun, but it wasn’t love. Or maybe it was. I don’t know. We definitely weren’t looking to start a family.”

“But you did.”

“When you’re a scientist, your late twenties are so critical. If you don’t publish something big by thirty, they put you out to pasture.”