You see him, the tall, slightly stooped figure, head a little bowed, hair hanging to his shoulders, going ahead into the market square. Framed by the alley, he is a dark shadow in the bright spring day. The May light is like a blade; you feel it, slicing over the Dordogne town, down into your bones. 

The street sign has made you smirk, take a tourist’s picture on your phone. You know it means sorcerers’ alleyway, but come on, anything with the word ‘passage’ in it is funny, it just is. And up ahead, walking along it, is your teacher, your friend, the one who conjures with words, whose stories unfold like spells. You should catch him up, fall into step at his side, this Sunday after a week in his company. 

You don’t. Some awkwardness drags at you, makes you hang back. You let him carry on, into the square, into the crowd, this tall spear of a man. He that goes before. 

What you don’t know, watching him disappear, is that there will never be another moment in which you can hurry after him. Your last chance is whisked away, without you noticing. Only later, months later, do you realise that fate has pulled a magician’s trick. You were looking the wrong way, and poof. He is gone. 

That is the way, with last times. The lastness of them lurks, invisible, waiting. The rings seem solid, the egg real, the cards unmarked. Life’s sleight-of-hand is good at making you believe your eyes. Until the secret trapdoor falls and what was right there, in plain sight, vanishes. 

You cannot know then that the news of his death will find you, at your work, one dull afternoon in early winter. That night you will not want to go to sleep, because you do not want to wake in a world without him in it. 

And yet, somehow, that night passes. More nights follow, one after each other, until it is a year later. Leaves fall again, leaves which budded and unfurled and drank the light and then began to die, all without his eyes to see them. 

You are haunted by the feeling of lostness, a wrong turn, a fingernail-snag moment when, if you had just been quicker… No. There is nothing for it but to keep stumbling on, always behind. You reach up to where the words come from, where you feel he must be. You scratch and pick at your work, scraping for flecks that feel true.

In the alleyway of your life, you are often in that memory again, dawdling in the beautiful light. The sorcerer has passed. You can never catch him up. Your steps are slow, bad-dream slow. It doesn’t matter: you won’t stop taking them, one after another, all the days you have left. It is thanks to him, after all, that you know the way to go.