Some things are hard to explain to your parents. Some things are hard to explain, period, but your parents especially are never going to understand them.
I am heavy in his arms, and I feel safe there, but I am lost, and I need constantly to be shoring up the wall that holds my emotions at bay, or I will feel something too great to contain.
It’s not that nobody ever gets away: that’s not true. It’s that you carry it with you. It doesn’t matter that the days roll on like hills too low to give names to; they might be of use later, so you keep them. You replay them to keep their memory alive. It feels worthwhile because it is.
And I started to say “fine,” and I meant to say “fine,” but I ended up saying that I felt my life was filled like a big jug to the brim with almost indescribable joy, so much that I hardly knew how to handle it.
For reasons that seem obvious to me, I don’t believe in happy endings or even in endings at all, but I am as susceptible to moments of indulgent fantasy as anybody else.
My parents’ room is an uncataloged planet, a night sky presence unknown to scientists but feared by the secret faithful who trade rumors of its mystery.
Some lessons you learn gradually and some you learn in a sudden moment, like a flash going off in a dark room.
Forever is a question you start asking when you look at the ceiling. It becomes a word you hear in the same way that people who associate sound with color might hear a flat sky-blue. The open sky through which forgotten satellites travel. Forever.
And then I played some music, old music, and it sounded awful, and I loved it, I loved it so much.
That’s what pictures are for, after all: to stand in place of the things that weren’t left behind, to bear witness to people and places and things that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Forever is a question you start asking when you look at the ceiling.
I imagined a quiet future in an imaginary world where nothing ever really happened but everything seemed charged with life.
Here and there, alone, reflecting, I’d bump up against what felt like a buffer zone between me and some vast reserve of grief, but its reinforcements were sturdy enough and its construction solid enough to prevent me from really ever smelling its air, feeling its wind on my face.
Trying to explain the feeling I had is like trying to describe what you see when your eyes are bandaged: it’s not impossible, but it’s different from describing something you can actually look at, something you might see in the course of a normal day. It is trying to describe something at which you are unable to look directly.
I was happy to know her in my small, formal, dependent way. And I felt a ravenous grief for nice boys who are too stupid to take care of themselves, and too dumb to remember to check the surrounding brush for snakes before settling down to sleep for the night.
No way of counting my blessings. No way for anyone to count that high.
You don’t think about how you really have your whole life planned out until a part of it goes missing suddenly one day.
A farmhouse has a way of feeling both timeless and impermanent without ever committing to either side.
I take the knife and stab myself in the neck. I bleed out on top of the fortune-teller’s grave and then I’m dead and that’s my game. I am OK and I’ll be OK but this is the end and this is my story. CH.
It’s hard to overstate how deep the need can get for things to make sense.