She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.
All I ever wanted was a world without maps.
We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.
There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lovers enter the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in a new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.
From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.
Her hand touched me at the wrist. “If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn’t you?” I didn’t say anything.
She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he had loved her when he understood her better, when she was the product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become.
She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.
Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils. The day seems to have no order until these times, which are like a ledger for her, her body full of stories and situations.