Where Reasons End 02 Waylaid by Days -3

It's not your fault, he said.
If you use fault in the sense of wrongdoing, I said, no, it's not.
But the root of the word fault came from to disappoint, to deceive.
Nikolai waited for me to go on. He was not often this patient in hearing me out.
Who can say to love doesn't also mean to disappoint and to deceive? I said.
Those who disappoint or deceive don't always do so from love, he said.
That, my child, doesn't help a parent. If the job description of parenting, I thought, had come with the requirement to disappoint and to deceive, how many of us would have set out with guiltless hope in the first place?
Or hopeless guilt? he said. But you've decided that in this world we don't abide by the rules that bind a child and a parent.
The line between self-deception and willpower is often blurred, I
said
I inherited both from you, didn't I? he said. It's not your fault, though.
Willpower was among his qualities I would remember. When he was in fifth grade, he had had trouble sleeping. Later he told me, when we were arguing, that whatever we had suggested had been of little help. I went to bed at nine and willed my body to stay still and my brain to stop thinking, he had said. That was how I solved my insomnia and that will always be the way I solve my problems. I can't rely on anyone but my own willpower.
The line between willpower and arrogance is blurred, too, I said.
That, unfortunately, cannot be changed, he said. Give will some power and it turns blind. Just as people with power become so full of themselves they can't see their own toes.
But then when does willpower see?
Willpower doesn't have eyes to see, he said. Wishy-washiness has eyes, though. Too many. Like Argos.
Nikolai used to call me wishy-washy because he had liked the sound of it.
We can't then let willpower lead us, I said.


You can't, he said.
But how else does one live if not by willpower, when day after day after day after day a child hides himself? I read him a stanza from a Larkin poem:
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us.
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Days are not the only place where we live, Nikolai said.
Time is not the only place where we live, I said. Days are.
I don't have to have days to live now.
And yet I have to live in days, I said.
I'm sorry, he said.
Days: the easiest possession, requiring only automatic participation. The days he had refused would come, one at a time.
Neither my allies nor my enemies, they would wait, every daybreak, with their boundless patience and indifference, seeing if they could turn me into a friend or an enemy to myself.
Never apologize, I said, for what you have let go.