I want to put my hands on your chest. I want to be in a thimble with you.
Ninguna mujer se puede resistir a un hombre que alberga maremotos y terremotos bajo la piel.
We’re petal people. I think about the earthquake kiss in the alcove and want to cry again.
His eyes are bright as the devil’s. “Say yes.
God, you’re gorgeous,” I blurt out and want to die because I can’t believe I said it aloud and neither can he – his smile, so huge now, he can’t even get any words past it.
I start to think about all the things I haven’t said since Bailey died, all the words stowed deep in my heart, in our orange bedroom, all the words in the whole world that aren’t said after someone dies because they are too sad, too enraged, too devastated, too guilty, to come out – all of them begin to course inside me like a lunatic river.
Dearest, I have gone mad. I do not want to eat or drink, or I will lose the taste of you in my mouth, do not want to open my eyes if not to see you, do not want to breathe any air that you have not breathe, that has not been inside your body, deep inside your beautiful body. I must.
Catches me by my shirt, whips me around, and with one strong hand flat against my chest, he pushes me against a tree and kisses me so hard I go blind.
Was the sky always this shade of magenta?
That’s what happened to him then: love. Tragic, impossible love.
You hurt before you can be hurt.
Que me das un miedo terrible. Que a ti no te puedo poner barreras como a todo el mundo. Que me aterra la posibilidad de que me rompas.
A comfortable quiet falls over us. Really comfortable, like we’ve lain on filthy floors corpselike together for several lifetimes now.
Only the luckiest humans find their split-apart, you see.
Beauty is God’s handwriting.
Write your sins on apples still hanging on the tree; when they fall away so do your burdens.
Aber ich kann nicht. Ich bin kein Feigling mehr. Ich habe es satt, auf Pause gestellt zu sein, vergraben und versteckt, vor Angst erstarrt im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes. Ich will mir keine Wiesen vorstellen, ich will durch sie hindurch laufen.
What’s up with the plant?” He points to the despairing Lennie houseplant in the middle of the table. It looks like it has leprosy. We all go silent, because what do we say about my doppelganger houseplant? “It’s Lennie, it’s dying, and frankly, we don’t know what to do about it,” Big booms with finality.
When men have it, no one seems to notice, they become astronauts or pilots or cartographers or criminals or poets. They don’t stay around long enough to know if they’ve fathered children or not. When women get it, well, it’s complicated, it’s just different.” “How?” I asked. “How is it different?” “Well, for instance, it’s not customary for a mother to not see her own girls for this many years, is it?” She had a point there.
Me too.” I pick up a stick, start digging with it. “Or maybe a person is just made up of a lot of people,” I say. “Maybe we’re accumulating these new selves all the time.” Hauling them in as we make choices, good and bad, as we screw up, step up, lose our minds, find our minds, fall apart, fall in love, as we grieve, grow, retreat from the world, dive into the world, as we make things, as we break things.