The Winter 2008 issue of The Paris Review features “The Lover,” a melancholy story by Damon Galgut about a young man traveling across the African continent. You can read the first few pages of the piece here.

I’d never read anything by Galgut before, even though he’s a critically acclaimed writer who has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and the IMPAC Dublin Award. Accidental finds like these are one of the best reasons for reading magazines—I get exposed to writers whom I might never have made the effort to track down on my own.

“The Lover” was an interesting story of accidental meetings and missed opportunities. What moved me the most was its penultimate paragraph:

A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it’s made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there. The roads you went down yesterday are full of different people now, none of them know who you are. In the room you slept in last night a stranger lies in the bed. Dust covers over your footprints, the marks of your fingers are wiped off the door, from the floor and table the bits and pieces of evidence that you might have dropped are swept up and thrown away and they never come back again. The very air closes behind you like water and soon your presence, which felt so weighty and permanent, has completely gone. Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

Whether it touched me more now than it might have at some other time due to recent events in my life I can’t say. I only know that this aside on the ephemeral nature of our passage through the world spoke to me now.