Sailing to an island unknown Failing to find your way home you walk under a sea leagues beneath us.
Strange what love taught you about your faults.
His was the disease we couldn’t cure. His was the good-bye that meant the most.
Now I am the unknown, the unknowable.
I never knew there were so many different ways to say good-bye.
Gift of time in me enclosed the future suddenly exposed.
Isabel had gone silent in a way that shouted the silence to me.
It was a strangely disorienting feeling, to have something you’d relied on for so long start to change, like finding out that gravity no longer worked on Mondays.
There was something striking about her posture; something about the tilt to her head. She was like a beautiful and lonely piece of art, lovely but unreachable.
We sat like that for a long while, and when we stood up, all my sad things were in boxes, and Beck was my father.
I loved you so much right then Sam Roth.
I’m not done writing songs about you yet.
Some people see what they want to see.
I was against felonies when a misdemeanor would do.
He was jingling his keys in the pocket of his coat – one of those barn coats described as rugged and classic and four hundred dollar that were usually worn by people who spend more time in Land Rovers than barns.
It occurred to me that there was a story behind the scar – maybe not as dramatic as the story of my wrists, but a story nonetheless – and the fact that everyone had a story behind some mark on their inside or outside suddenly exhausted me, the gravity of all those untold pasts.
Of course he was a part of what I hated about myself. Everything was a part of what I hated about myself. It wasn’t really personal.
He had a carrying, congressional sort of voice, the kind that sounded good saying things like Less of a tax burden on the middle class and Thank you for your donation and Honey, could you bring me my sweater with the duck on it?
It was one frayed rope thrown across the chasm between us. Not enough to get across, but maybe just enough to tell that it wasn’t as wide as I’d originally thought.
I wasn’t sure if I admired him for feeling everything so hard and fiercely, or if I was contemptuous of him for having so much emotion that he had to spill it out every window of the house.