The Comet

My career has been a very long haul across the years and the oceans. I started writing when I was five, but my adult stories met with little success. I then turned to the business of theory, where recognition wasn’t easy or full, but it came: my first book took me places and garnered me intellectual respect. I threw myself onto a second one, convinced that I would make it to the top. That didn’t happen (at least not immediately) and I became disenchanted. Am I a star, I asked a friend. You are a comet, he replied after a while, and I remembered the flash that crossed the skies two years ago. I would stand on the landing outside my floor every night and stare at that cosmic body as if there were nothing else in the entire firmament. I am watching a comet, I’d tell myself, intent on visualizing its endless travels past burning suns and rotating planets. I am watching a comet, as I gazed at that distant spec of the universe, its long tail a glittery blur.