Ever since the other boy had arrived half way through the semester, he’d been so blue, he was practically iridescent.
And then the wind smacked the house. Bring it on! I shouted. Or, just maybe, this is another thing in my absurd life that I whispered.
She moved through her life, letting the days drag her after them. But.
I like to think it’s a happy ending, though it is the middle that haunts me.
She curled into a ball to gather her strength and lay there, crying with anger and exhaustion. She was alone and she conceded to her aloneness, she would always be alone, she would always be in these puddles that grew even as she lay in them. For a very long time, she lay there, and it wasn’t terrible, despite the wind and rain upon her. It was only blank.
The world is sometimes too much for Bit, too full of terror and beauty. Every day he finds himself squeezed under a new astonishment. The universe pulses outward at impossible speeds. Bit feels its spin into nothing.
Never. Never for me. I’d die first. Never’s a liar.
Life isn’t worth living unless you are young and surrounded by other young people in a beautiful cold garden perfumed by dirt and flowers and fallen leaves, gleaming in the string of lights, listening to the quiet city on the last fine night of the year.
Men can do that, become more handsome as they grow older. Women just age.
Nothing is all stark and clear any longer, nothing stands in opposition. Good and evil live together; dark and light. Contradictions can be true at once. The world holds a great and pulsing terror at its center. The world is ecstatic in its very deeps.
Aging is a constant loss; all the things considered essential in youth prove with time that they are not. Skins are shed, and left at the roadside for the new young to pick up and carry on.
Animals are closer to god, of course; this is because animals have no need of god.
Open your hands and let your life go. It has never been yours to do with what you will.
How strange, she thinks. Belief has grown upon her. Perhaps, she thinks, it is something like a mold.
Women act counter to all the laws of submission when they remove themselves from availability.
For when it comes to strength and goodness and brilliance and gentleness and grandneur of spirit so vast that it takes one’s breath away, beauty is nothing, beauty is a mote of a mountain, beauty is a mere straw alight beside a barn on fire.
For it is a deep and human truth that most souls upon the earth are not at ease unless they find themselves safe in the hands of a force far greater than themselves.
Foolish creature, old Marie would say to that child. Open your hands and let your life go. It has never been yours to do with what you will.
The abbess is exhausted and pale. She smiles and says, Oh of course I made it up. Ritual creates its own catharsis, Marie. Mystical acts create mystical beliefs. And then, lulled by the rocking of her fat little horse, the abbess falls asleep.
Only when she has re-created in ink upon parchment what she saw does she fully understand it. Visions are not complete until they have been set down and stepped away from, turned this way and that in the hand.