I forced myself to picture the last moments. The penultimate breath. A final sigh. And yet. It was always followed by another.
Then he almost but didn’t say the two sentence he’d been meaning to say for years: part of me is made of glass, and also, I love you.
I know there is a moral to this story, but I don’t know what it is.
After she left everything fell apart. No Jew was safe. There were rumors of unfathomable things, and because we couldn’t fathom them we failed to believe them, until we had no choice and it was too late. p 8.
Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you.
Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together.
That’s what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I’m not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.
Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have been.
After all who doesn’t wish to make a spectacle of their loneliness.
It’s strange what the heart can do when the mind is giving the directions.
There are so many ways to be alive, but only one way to be dead.
She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you’d grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.
I wished to punish her for her intolerable stoicism, which made it impossible for me to ever be truly needed by her in the most profound ways a person can need another, a need that often goes by the name of love.
There was no one to call me to bed, no one to demand that the rhythms of my life operate in a duet.
The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved; but to describe it-just to name it-must have been like trying to catch something invisible.
He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it.
We met each other when we were young, before we knew enough about disappointment, and once we did we found we reminded each other of it.
Alone in my room, wrapped in a blanket, I whimpered and talked aloud to myself, recalling the lost glory of my youth when I considered myself, and was considered by others, a bright and capable person. It seemed that was all gone now.
The truth is that she told me she couldn’t love me. When she said goodbye, she was saying goodbye forever. And yet. I made myself forget. I don’t know why. I keep asking myself. But I did.
Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist, there are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges and absorbs the impact.