Hindsight.

If I'd known that it was the last time I was ever going to see you, I'd have done any number of things differently:

• I wouldn't have raced for the train with such vigour; putting my drink down at 13:27, and eating up the ground between the café and the platform as though my very existence depended on being there no later than 13:30.
• I'd instead have watched you erase yourself to a flickering dot in the distance, never unfixing my eye from your retreating body. I'd have suspended myself in the one place until the automatic doors swallowed you, and you disappeared into the mouth of London.
• The previous night, I'd not have done anything as tediously human as falling asleep. I should have patiently sculpted an image of you onto my consciousness, one arrived at from long hours of working in the half-light, so that I might invoke you in the same unrehearsed, unthinking manner as I exhale.
• I'd have measured and weighed the significance of every second, counting the last few with the expression of the condemned.
• Would that I had excoriated your mind of every synaptic connection. I thought we had more time to do so - I was wrong. I wished to not only understand, but be permitted to see, the furnace which powered your thoughts.