The windows are open, admitting the September breeze: a month that smells like notepaper and pencil shavings, autumn leaves and car oil. A month that smells like progress, like moving on.
Parents teach us our very first lesson about love: that you sure as hell don’t get to choose it.
And yet in only a few hours we’ve managed to erase her almost entirely. All of her things – bought, received, painstakingly selected; her tastes and preferences; all the random stuff accumulated over the years – all of it sorted, trashed, or packed up in less than a day. How easily we get erased.
I remember something Mrs. Harbor once said on one of her crazy tangents in English: that Plato believed that the whole world – everything we can see – was just like shadows on a cave wall. We can’t actually see the real thing, the thing that’s casting the shadow in the first place.
Or maybe it’s life that is the infection: a feverish dream, a hallucination of feelings. Death is purification, a cleansing, a cure.
But it was true she had never hurt anyone to get what she wanted. Was that what made her less than human?
That’s the thing about hearts. They don’t get put back together, not really. They just get patched. But the damage is still there.
I wonder if you fall forever and ever and never touch down, is it still falling?
We’re all just a collection of wires pulled tight, charged beyond capacity – a tangle of plugs and valves, waiting for a surge to take down the whole system.
You can’t cheat if there are no rules.
I guess we all have some of these – memories like artillery shells, fired at close range.
Walking into parties always gives me a crampy feeling at the bottom of my stomach. Its a good feeling though: The feeling of knowing anything can happen. Most of the time nothing does, of course. Most of the time one night blends into the next, and weeks blend into weeks, and months into other months. And sooner or later we die.
It is a strange phrase, ‘falling in love,’” said one of the princesses in the tower. Tears stood out on her cheeks, and even these were pretty, reflecting the blue sky above her. “It sounds like something you do accidentally, by yourself. But isn’t someone else always to blame? They should call it strangling in love. Walloped in love. Knocked-out-of-nowhere in love.
She didn’t realize how much depends on what you’re remembered for. Sometimes, it’s so much better to be forgotten.
And for a split second I find her, silhouetted by the sky, arms outstretched like she’s making snow angels in the air or simply laughing, turning in place; for a split second, she comes to me as the clouds, the sun, the wind touching my face and telling me that somehow, someday, it will be okay.
She’s like a person looking through the wrong end of a telescope, complaining that everything looks small.
I started to think about time, and how it keeps moving and draining and flowing forever forward, seconds into minutes into days into years, all of it leading to the same place, a current running forever in one direction. And we’re all going and swimming as fast as we can, helping it along.
That’s modernity, if you ask me: endless division.
Up and down, up and down, a ladder of choices leading to the next choice, and the next, until suddenly you’ve run out of choices, and ladder, and you find time as rare and thin as air on a mountain. Then it’s oops, sorry, turn’s over.
Just listen, okay?” He grabs my shoulders before I can move past him, and I know, I know that something huge is happening, the kind of thing that takes worlds apart and remakes them. Hurricanes and tornadoes and boys with blue eyes.