As is true of most incipient bad things in life, i had not really prepared myself for this possibility.
Maybe I only see a pattern because I’ve been staring too long. But then again, maybe I see a pattern because it’s there.
He had never seen a gunshot wound. He kept asking what if felt like? dull or sharp? an ache or a burn? My head was spinning and naturally I could give him no kind of coherent answer but I remember thinking dimly that it was sort of like the first time I got drunk, or slept with a girl; not quite what one expected, really, but once it happened it couldn’t be any other way. Neon lights: Motel 6, Dairy Queen. Colors so bright, they nearly broke my heart.
Everything was lost, I had fallen off the map: the disorientation of being in the wrong apartment, with the wrong family, was wearing me down, so I felt groggy and punch-drunk, weepy almost, like an interrogated prisoner prevented from sleeping for days. Over and over, I kept thinking I’ve got to go home and then, for the millionth time, I can’t.
Things would have been terribly strange and unbalanced without her. She was the Queen who finished out the suit of dark Jacks, dark King, and Joker.
He played with relish, sleeves rolled up, smiling at his work, tinkling from the low ranges to the high with the tricky syncopation of a tap dancer going up a Ziegfeld staircase.
A veces tienes que perder para ganar.
I read The Great Gatsby. It is one of my favorite books and I had taken it out of the library in hopes that it would cheer me up; of course, it only made me feel worse, since in my own humorless state I failed to see anything except what I construed as certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself.
No law against throwing a coat in the canal, is there?” “I would have thought so, yes.” “Well – who knows. Not very widely enforced law, if you ask me.
They were a pair of white mice, I thought – only Kitsey was a spun-sugar, fairy-princess mouse whereas Andy was more the kind of luckless, anemic, pet-shop mouse you might feed to your boa constrictor. “Get.
Reason is always apparent to a discerning eye. But luck? It’s invisible, erratic, angelic.
I think this goes more to the idea of ‘relentless irony’ than ‘divine providence.’ ” “Yes – but why give it a name? Can’t they both be the same thing?
Well, a change of scenery may be good for you,” said Hobie when I went down to see him before I left. “Even if the scene isn’t what you’d choose.
Our large age difference made us shy with each other; there was a formality, a generational reserve;.
Whe can’t escape who we are.
To try to make some meaning out of all this seems.
You wan’t to know what Classics are?” said a drunk Dean of Admissions to me at a faculty party a couple of years ago. “I’ll tell you what Clasdics are. War and homos.” A sententious and vulgar statement, certainly, but like many such gnomic vulgarities, it also contains a tiny splinter of truth.
But I didn’t. And, in truth, it was maybe better that I didn’t- I say that now, though it was something I regretted bitterly for a while. More than anything I was relieved that in my unfamiliar babbling-and-wanting-to-talk state I’d stopped myself from blurting the thing on the edge of my tongue, the thing I’d never said, even though it was something we both knew well enough without me saying it out loud to him in the street- which was, of course, I love you.
He looked very tired, a regard which manifested itself not in dark circles, or pallor, but a dreamy and bright-cheeked sadness.
Running might take her forward, it could even take her home; but it couldn’t take her back – not ten minutes, ten hours, not ten years or days.