I love the laughter of this night. Our footsteps run, and I don’t want them to end. I want to run and laugh and feel like this forever. I want to avoid any awkward moment when the realness of reality sticks its fork into our flesh, leaving us standing there, together. I want to stay here, in this moment, and never go to other places, where we don’t know what to say or what to do. For now, just let us run. We run straight through the laughter of the night.
In the darkness of my dark-beating heart, I know. He’d have loved it, all right.
Don’t think, I told myself. Think nothingness. But even nothingness was something. It was a thought.
He loved her more than Michelangelo.
The world is lightening, taking shape, and turning to color.
Around six-thirty, Rory was across the street, leaning against a telegraph pole, smiling just for laughs; the world was filthy, and so was he. After a short search, he pulled a long strand of girls’ hair from his mouth. Whoever she was, she was out there somewhere, she lay open-legged in Rory’s head. A girl we’ll never know, or see.
Now I’ve changed things. I’ve left my own fingerprints on the world, no matter how small, and it’s upset the equilibrium of us.
The town itself was a hard, distant storyland; you could see it from afar. There was all the straw-like landscape, and marathons of sky. Around it, a wilderness of low scrub and gum trees stood close by, and it was true, it was so damn true: the people sloped and slouched.
I deliberately seek out the colors to keep my mind off them, but now and then, I witness the ones who are left behind, crumbling among the jigsaw puzzle of realization, despair and surprise.
It was a nice dream, and an impossible one.
It’s chaos out there, and chaos is what we need.
Sometimes she sat against the wall, longing for the warm finger of paint to wander just once more down the side of her nose, or to watch the sandpaper texture of her papa’s hands. If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter and bread with only the scent of jam spread out on top of it. It was the best time of her life.
She was lost in pine and mountainside, her knuckles bony white.
In a way, I wish I could be like that. You’d never worry or care about anything that really mattered. You’d be happy, in the same pitiful way someone like our friend Ritchie is. Nothing affects you, and you affect nothing.
One thing I’ve noticed about the Germans: They seem very fond of pigs.
Is this yours?’ ‘Yes, Papa.’ ‘Do you want to read it?’ Again, ‘Yes, Papa.’ A tired smile. Metallic eyes, melting. ‘Well we’d better read it then.
We all have our duties here. We all suffer. We all endure our setbacks for the greater good of mankind.
That makes two weeks. Two weeks to change the world, and fourteen days to ruin it.
It makes me think of my life, my nonexistent accomplishments and my overall abilities in incompetence.
The moon was sewn into the sky that night.