By Mark Salamon

The soul, too, has its geometric center, and those wise enough not to search for it often find it all the same. The wound of initiation: at times something to conceal, at others an ornament, until one day it becomes what it is — an indelible life, by the will of God.

From autumn until summer, for nearly a year, I dreamed with my eyes open in a university town.

Young gentlemen, they used to call me and my dissolute friend.

They were right. At least about me. I was no longer an unemployed graduate but a man earning his living, a man who let the woman he loved leave for a distant country because, out of sheer stubbornness, he refused to marry.

“You can’t live like this,” Zita would laugh with delicious cruelty.

And yet for a few months, she held me captive simply by saying yes to everything.

“I could have been a very good prostitute,” she whispered once. “I think about that a lot.”

Other times, she narrowed her eyes theatrically.

“It’s a helping profession too. Like yours.”

“So it is,” I replied — with a confidence I would not have possessed only months before.

“That’s not my hair,” she laughed one morning. “It’s blonde.”

Still, she washed the sheets that very day.

“You said something so beautiful I didn’t throw up for a whole week.”

No compliment I had ever given received higher praise.

“She’s beautiful,” Zita would say, shaking her head. “I can’t stop looking at her.”

Yet she hated me for showing her a photograph of the woman I loved, a woman who was only in the past if measured by a calendar.

At least during those months, I spent less time in bars.

My bohemian friend drank enough for both of us, while the two of us worked private jobs in perfect harmony.

A firing offense, certainly.

What does it matter?

What matters is this: everything lies at the same distance from the center of the soul.