She was standing on the moon and if I responded I would be on the moon too, right next to her.
At its best, my system gives me a smoother living experience. My days become dreamlike, no edges anywhere, none of the snags and snafus that life is so famous for. After days and days alone it gets silky to the point where I can’t even feel myself anymore, it’s as if I don’t exist.
Each word he said was boring, but collectively the melody of them lulled me. I tried to resist, but just the weight of him, in pounds and ounces, was a relief.
I smiled into the air the way I smiled when customers unbuckled their belts, and I made my eyes laugh as if everything were some version of a good time.
It had not occurred to me that it would get this bad, that indignity would dance upon bloodshed.
The longer I stood there, the longer I had to stand there. It was intricate and exponential. I looked like I was doing nothing, but really I was as busy as a physicist or a politician. I was strategizing my next move. That my next move was always not to move didn’t make it any easier.
So this was what it was like not to be me.
Where did they go, those things we did?
Tom looked across the patio, our eyes met, and for a split second I remembered my drunken nineteen-year-old face pressed against his chest at a party, his lips resting on the top of my head, murmuring, You know I wish I could.
I had forgotten about the baby. Until then she had been giving birth to birth – to contractions and noises and liquids. There was someone in there. We.
The boy was growing bored and this was a form of growing up.
Everyone knows that if you paint a human being entirely with house paint he will live, as long as you don’t paint the bottom of his feet. It takes only a little thing like this to kill a person.
I’m not saying I asked for it, only that there are moments when we are sending signals not just to the boys in the room but to all of creation.
You seem incredibly faraway to me, like someone on the other side of a lake. A dot so small that it isn’t male or female or young or old; it is just smiling.
A real mother throws her heart over the fence and then climbs after it.
Their prayer was rage.
The singer was lifted up and illuminated with gratitude, not for any one thing, but for the whole of his life, even for the agony. Even in Latin you could tell he was thanking God for the agony in particular, for the way it allowed him to cleave so tightly to the world.
After a minute a willowy woman with a baby boy came out. The baby was swinging a crystal from a string. I checked to see if he and I had a special connection that was greater than his bond with his mother. We didn’t.
I was an angel looking down into the world, into one car on the world, into two members of mankind, into their souls, and into the place behind their souls: the void.
I wanted her to know, from the moment she heard my voice, that I was dying. I delivered a salutation so craven, so wretched, that it fell through language like pebbles. Hello.