Don’t turn over the rocks if you don’t want to see the pale creatures who live under them.
That was what she really wanted. To forget so thoroughly she’d never have another memory again, the bitter so bitter you gave up the sweet.
The story of her life. God gave you everything just to take it away. Just so you knew exactly what you were missing.
It’s all I ever really wanted, that revelation. The possibility of fixed stars.
I liked it when my mother tried to teach me things, when she paid attention. So often when I was with her, she was unreachable. Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.
She’s never where she is,′ I said. ‘She’s only inside her head.
It’s their skins I’m peeling,” she said. “The skins of the insipid scribblers, which I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness.
Rena noticed me watching it pass. ‘You think they don’t got problem?’ Rena said. ‘Everybody got problem. You got me, they got insurance, house payment, Preparation H.’ She smiled, baring the part between her two upper teeth. ‘We are the free birds. They want to be us.
Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after.
I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despair wasn’t a guest, you didn’t play its favourite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy.
All that was a dream, you couldn’t hold on, you couldn’t depend on frosted glass and Debussy.
She was my life raft, my turtle.
Mother prescribing her books like medicines. A good dose of Whitman would set me straight, like castor oil. But at least she was thinking of me. I existed once more.
I felt on the verge of something, a mystery that surrounded me like gauze, something I was beginning to unwind.
His voice was cloves and nightingales.
Maybe there was just the Devil, the real God of this lousy world.
Memory is the fourth landscape.
Now was too big, like a giant dark planet coming up over the horizon. she wanted then. That’s what he’d seen that day, a brightness with darkness all around, watching her, as if she were glamorous, as if she were a rare and mysterious creature.
Love humiliates you, hatred cradles you.
Her voice made me drunk, deep and sun-warmed, a hint of a foreign accent, Swedish singsong a generation removed.