Time is a boomerang, not an arrow.
There was an ending – there always is – but the story went on past the ending – it always does.
What is it that I have to tell myself again and again? That there is always a new beginning, a different end.
All I am saying is that love is not exclusively human.
I keep forgetting that if you live in a big city only mad people talk to themselves.
It takes so little time to change a lifetime and it takes a lifetime to understand the change.
One of us hadn’t finished, why did the other one go? And why without warning? Even death after long illness is without warning. The moment you had prepared for so carefully took you by storm. The troops broke through the window and snatched the body and the body is gone. The day before the Wednesday last, this time a year ago, you were here and now you’re not. Why not? Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a small child. If yesterday why not today? And where are you?
Christmas is about community, collaboration, celebration. Done right, Christmas can be an antidote to the Me First mentality that has rebranded capitalism as neo-liberalism. The shopping mall isn’t our true home, nor is it a public space, though, as libraries, parks, playgrounds, museums and sports facilities disappear, for many the fake friendliness of the mall is the only public space left, apart from the streets.
For my part, I think we need more emotion, not less. But I think, too, that we need to educate people in how to feel. Emotionalism is not the same as emotion. We cannot cut out emotion – in the economy of the human body, it is the limbic, not the neural, highway that takes precedence. We are not robots – apologies there, Spike – but we act as though all our problems would be solved if only we had no emotions to cloud our judgement.
Take two people. Slice lengthways. Boil with the lid on. Add a marriage, a past, another woman. Sugar to taste. Pass through a chance meeting. Lubricate sparingly. Serve on a bed of – or is it in a bed of –? Use fresh and top with raw emotion.
It’s not a word people use very often, which confuses me, because there are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it. By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else’s.
En de tijd die zo gestaag en zo zeker voorbijgaat slaat voorbij de klokken op hol. Het kost zo weinig tijd om een leven te veranderen en het kost een heel leven om die verandering te begrijpen.
People do go back, but they don’t survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you can choose between the two realities. There is much pain here.
It’s always the same with diversions; you get involved.
The words come at my call but who calls whom?
The past is magnetic. It draws us in.
Pillars hold things up, and salt keeps things clean, but it’s a poor exchange for losing your self. People do go back, but they don’t survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time.
Perhaps this is how it is – life flowing smoothly over memory and history, the past returning or not, depending on the tide. History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities, surface towards us, then sink away. Some we hook out, others we ignore, and as the pattern changes, so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time, which returns everything, changes everything.
Feeling. I didn’t want to feel.
The moment has been waiting the way the top step of the stairs waits for the sleepwalker.