Kathy's Story

The following are a series of interwoven reflections on Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go, a tragically beautiful, under-recognized film based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s award-winning novel. I’ve tried my best to foresee the unseen tides.

We’re not immortal. We’re mortal.

By the meadow, Kathy waited. Standing before her, guarding, was a barbed wire fence on which two white pieces of cloth shivered, timelessly, and ricocheted against the metal and against the wind. Far out, beyond the solemn gate of reprisals, were memories of her youth, those which she could see but not feel. Death had taken them from her. Life had, too.

But Kathy waited. She thought that if she waited long enough, that maybe a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field and gradually get larger until I'd see it was Tommy. He'd wave. And maybe call.

And if he did? She’d be reminded of all she’d lost and gained. Of how she hoped to lock the treasures of her innermost with her closest, but how time had dwarfed them all. Outplayed them. Outsmarted them. But not outlasted them. Not her. Not yet.

And if he did? Perhaps then her heart would ache stronger than before, and she’d be brave, though wishing furiously that what she had been told could never be true was in fact a lie—that she could get a deferral. That there, then, if she waited long enough, Tommy would come with buckets and shovels and they’d go running down to the beach, sit down and build a castle. And if the waves were conservative and their water on short supply, that the tears they had cried at Hailsham would fill the empty space where passageways and bridges were to be.

If only we could stop the seconds on our mortal clock, then maybe half the tears would go to joy and not to sadness.

To love and not to madness.

It depended on how hard she squinted. Also on Tommy’s ability to rise, resurrected, and return with the hair he had grown at the cottages where paths split and then diverged. And split again and converged. And split a thousand times like blood that spatters and friends that disappear. And splinters. That hurt. But how that pain makes you feel alive and how if you never felt it, you’d be worried.

Time can’t make us happy. A closing window can. If we were given a preview. But what does that tell us about the way we live our lives?

Hailsham didn’t just change them—it was them. Before they were born (if they were ever that), it waited for them. Not across a meadow like a longing or a hope, but across a prison where a guard awaits to escort a new inmate—like a minor, for example, who had been accused of breathing on the wrong street or looking in the wrong direction.

I didn’t know they made laws like that.

They did.

I think Kathy sighed. When she finished, I think she frowned. When she finished, I think she inhaled again. And when she finished, I think she cared, and held on.

It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed. If I'd known, maybe I'd have kept tighter hold of them and not let unseen tides pull us apart.




We all complete, no doubt. And maybe we’re all distraught by the time life has lapped us; when we fall down against the barrier gasping for the air we never thought we’d need. But Kathy, if she were with us now, would likely argue that as much as we may often want to look back, or look forward, it may pay more dividends to stand in place. She’d talk to us across the meadow, where her and Tommy would be reunited and from where they would run to the sand and make it into a castle, to compensate for all the years that were taken from them.

Kathy would tell us to live.

Time We Let Free

Fear is not the only thing that hides in closets. Nor are shadows.

Memories, too, hide in closets—masking as old, worn-out jeans and rumpled t-shirts. Memories we may at some point wanted to deal with, but want no longer. Maybe these memories are in fact fears, or maybe they are romantic imaginings we had in our youths but which we have tucked under our beds at 14 or 15 because we were afraid of some shadows haunting us in the form of ghosts.

We believed in ghosts, then.

But sometimes memories are long and gone, their conception far and before the time that is now our own. Sometimes memories are histories, whether real or imaginary.

And often these histories precede us. They develop in generations different in thought and influence than what we have perceived of as familiar, and have become emblematic of transformations we perhaps once read of in glancing fashion but know very little about. As it were, these histories existed before we knew what was or was not in our closets or under our beds: before we first donned our baby body-suits and our size-zero slippers with teddy-bear patterns; before we knew of girls and boys and crushes and heartbreaks; and before we could consciously be scared of anything, let alone shadows that creep around in the dusty corners of our bedrooms where sunlight is—at best—a casual visitor (intruder?).

Yet they implicate us. These memories bind us. Much like traffic lights do, and systems of governance. Beehives and the instructions manual for kite-flying. (And what to do when your string gets tangled.) The law of gravity and that of cause and effect. Frustrating yet steadfast rules of sport. Baking bread and braiding hair. Skydiving. Tap dancing. Tap water. Snow days.

And love. And hate. And hate out of love. And love of hate. And the kind of hate that really makes us love a person, even when all we want to do is let them go.

Yes, these are memories, too. Perhaps they are learned, but so too is the history of war and the history of peace. So is the history of everything in between.

They are unspoken ghosts—these stories and statutes and smells and smiles of yesteryear. And still, in the closet they lay. And under our beds. Alongside the old notes that we used to pass in class when we first learned the rules of engagement. What was allowed and what was less allowed. Flirting and playing and wishing and dreaming. Alongside the titanium tennis racquet in silver (which no one had seen, but us) and the deflated tennis balls with faded, dying print. Alongside the grade reports and the old CD's. Alongside the children's books and the decks of cards. Alongside our deepest secrets, which the sun told the shadows when they rendezvoused.

It's time we let free. That we learned how to disentangle the kite and let it soar with a wave of the wind—ride the shape of a cloud and maybe kiss a raindrop or two. It's time we faced history, and time we faced ourselves.

No, I'm not only talking about the bad history of the world. Also the good. The happy. The charming. The refreshing and the audaciously creative history.

Like that painting you made one day in 4th grade, came home—through the kitchen, up the stairs, into your room—and threw away for whomever would catch.

Like that moment in elementary, middle, or high school that you wanted everyone to see but which no one was there for.

Like that picture of how it could have been to feel the fountain's water splashing against your face on that immaculate summer day when her friends were playing outside—laughing, living.



But how you dropped it, once, and how it shattered.

And how a new picture, with a new fountain, with a new summer day, and with laughing, and with living, and with water—how that would have set you free, and still can.

We'll do it together

One. One. OneOne.

The journey begins. And I begin with it.

Also with us is Bertrand Russel, recipient of the 1950 Nobel Prize in Literature and special guest in this first blog post of many to come.

In the prologue to his autobiography, entitled What I Have Lived For Russel reflects:

"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

"I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.

"With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

"Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

"This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me."

Russel's convictions, in many ways, mirror my own. I often grow frustrated at all that I cannot change. I sigh when the pain felt half-way across the world reverberates and overwhelms me. But it never quite defeats me.

I look forward. To thinking with you. To writing with you. To questioning with you. To keeping alive the dream of peace- a flame that must be kindled and kept.

We'll do it together.