All that blind, infantile hunger to save and be saved, to repeat the past and make it different, had somehow attached itself, ravenously, to her.
Where does it ever say, anywhere, that only bad can come from bad actions? Maybe sometimes – the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want to be?
I waited, uncertainly, my eyes on the Japanese chest. It was a beauty, a prize for a retired sea-captain’s home in backwater Boston: scrimshaw and cowrie shells, Old Testament samplers cross-stitched by unmarried sisters, the smell of whale oil burning in the evenings, the stillness of growing old.
At one time I had liked the idea, that the act, at least, had bound us together; we were not ordinary friends, but friends till-death-do-us-part. This thought had been my only comfort in the aftermath of Bunny’s death. Now it made me sick, knowing there was no way out. I was stuck with them, with all of them, for good.
I knew my mother’s feet, her clothes, her two-tone black and white shoes – and long after I was sure of it I made myself stand in their midst, folded deep inside myself like a sick pigeon with its eyes closed.
Weren’t we, as sentient beings, put upon the earth to be happy, in the brief time allotted to us?
With the striped umbrella and the pistachio ices?
I’ll probably think about it all my life: that candlelit circle, a tableau vivant of the daily, commonplace happiness that was lost when I lost her.
What’s worth living for? what’s worth dying for? what’s completely foolish to pursue?
I’ve come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don’t, and can’t, understand. What’s mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn’t fit into a story, what doesn’t have a story. Glint of brightness on a barely-there chain. Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creature from every other.
There’s a pattern and we’re a part of it. Yet if you scratched very deep at that idea of pattern, you hit an emptiness so dark that it destroyed, categorically, anything you’d ever looked at or thought of as light.
The twilights out there were florid and melodramatic, great sweeps of orange and crimson and Lawrence-in-the-desert vermilion, then night dropping dark and hard like a slammed door.
At this question, I felt a sharp rush of despair – for as bad as I felt there was nothing he could do for me, and from his face, I realized he knew that, too.
And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky...
Nitric acid. Lampblack. Furniture, like all living things, acquired marks and scars over the course of time. The effects of time, visible and invisible.
Over and over, I kept thinking I’ve got to go home and then, for the millionth time, I can’t.
Three coffees, two with milk, please,” said Francis to the fat woman behind the counter. “No milk, just Cremora.” “Well, then, just black, I guess.” He turned to us. “Have you seen the paper this morning?
My love was muddied-up below the waterline with my mother, with my mother’s death, with losing my mother and not being able to get her back. All that blind, infantile hunger to save and be saved, to repeat the past and make it different, had somehow attached itself, ravenously, to her. There was an instability in it, a sickness.
He was a little drunk; the Chopin was slurred and fluid, the notes melting sleepily into one another.
I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.’ That’s not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you.