Love is bound up in truth.
I told myself that imagining a met in my brain or my shoulder would not affect the invisible reality going on inside of me, and that therefore all such thoughts were wasted moments in a life composed of a definitionally finite set of such moments. I even tried to tell myself to live my best life today.
I was still at the beginning. I could still be anybody.
All I want in this world is to keep you. Keep you from hurt, keep you from stress, all that.” I hugged her. “You know I love you.
Okay, well, I feel more like seven things than one thing.
In real life, some things get better and some things get worse.
We are all just side effects.
I can no more choose my thoughts than choose my name.
Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don’t you believe in true love?′ I didn’t answer. I didn’t have an answer. But I thought that if true love did exist, that was a pretty good definition of it.
How can you just be so wrong about something?
She sang lead, and I belted out the background voice that just repeated, “You’re everything everything everything,” and I felt like I was. You’re both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You’re the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You’re the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody’s something, but you are also you.
Milk is a clear liquid, she said. Lies, I answered.
And I was left to ask, Did I help you toward a fate you didn’t want, Alaska, or did I assist your willful self-destruction? Because they are different crimes, and I didn’t know whether to feel angry at her for making me part of her suicide or just to feel angry at myself for letting her go.
The world is a globe – the farther you sail, the closer to home you are.” – TERRY PRATCHETT.
About nine seconds later, a blond stewardess rushed over to our row and said, “Sir, you can’t smoke on this plane. Or any plane.” “I don’t smoke,” he explained, the cigarette dancing in his mouth as he spoke. “But – ” “It’s a metaphor,” I explained. “He puts the killing thing in his mouth but doesn’t give it the power to kill him.” The stewardess was flummoxed for only a moment. “Well, that metaphor is prohibited on today’s flight,” she said. Gus nodded and rejoined the cigarette to its pack.
I’ll see you then. And I’ll write in the meantime,” I say. “Yes,” she says without turning around, her voice thick. “I’ll write you, too.” It is saying these things that keeps us from falling apart. And maybe by imagining these futures we can make them real, and maybe not, but either way we must imagine them.
And as I walked back to give Takumi’s note to the Colonel, I saw that I would never know. I would never know her well enough to know her thoughts in those last minutes, would never know if she left us on purpose. But the not-knowing would not keep me from caring, and I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart.
Because there is no glory in illness.
And it is only now, when she closes her notebook and places it inside a backpack next to her and then stands up and walks toward us, that I realize that the idea is not only wrong but dangerous. What a treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person.
A message from Margo Roth Spiegelman: Your friendship with her – it sleeps with the fishes.