I read and savagely mourn, as if reading could somehow sate this hunger for grief, instead of what it does, which is fuel it.
Time would not care if you fell out of it. It would continue on without you. It cannot see you; it has always been blind to the human and the things we do to stave it off, the taxonomies, the cleaning, the arranging, the ordering.
He longed for something wordless and potent: what? To wear her.
Privilege is what lets you take risks.
A QUESTION OF VISION. From the sun’s seat, after all, humanity is an abstraction. Earth a mere spinning blip. Closer, the city a knot of light between other knots; even closer, and buildings gleamed, slowly separating. Dawn in the windows revealed bodies, all the same. Only with focus came specifics, mole by nostril, tooth stuck to a dry bottom lip in sleep, the papery skin of an armpit.
So leave. What does it matter. Everyone leaves. It is not the big story in the end.
How disappointing, when people succumb to what is expected of them.
Men were not as disciplined or as smart as women, she though: men almost always took what they were offered, their appetites too crude and raw to put up much resistance. There were like children, gobbling down their candy all at once, with no thought about the consequences of their greed.
Yuppies in embryo, miming their parents’ manners. In twenty years, they’d have country houses and children with pretentious literary names and tennis lessons and ugly cars and liaisons with hot young interns. Hurricanes of entitlement, all swirl and noise and destruction, nothing at their centers.
What she did not tell him balanced neatly with what she did.
A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges.
Somehow, despite her politics and smarts, she had become a wife, and wives, as we all know, are invisible. The midnight elves of marriage. The house in the country, the apartment in the city, the taxes, the dog, all were her concern: he had no idea what she did with her time. It would have been compounded with children; thank goodness for childlessness, then.
The wolf spun, settled in her chest, snored there.
He stepped closer to her and put his head in the crook of her neck and breathed his inadequacy out there, breathed in her love and the grease of her travels and knew he had been lucky, and that he had escaped the hungry dark once more.
The forest was not dark, because darkness has nothing to do with the forest – the forest is made of life, of light – but the trees moved with wind and subtle creatures.
She had to believe of herself that the better story was the true one, even if the worse was insistent.
So you win. No matter what, you win. It all works out for you in the end. Always. Someone or something’s looking out for you. It’s maddening.
Three glasses into a bottle of bourbon; it was past four, who cared? He had nowhere to be; he had nothing to do; he was deeply depressed, fracking depressed, deep-shale shattered.
We’re lonely down here,” he said. “It’s true. But we’re not alone.
The balls it took to proclaim a creative profession, the narcissism.