Whim.

be softer with you. you are a breathing thing. a memory to someone. a home to a life.

Sometimes it takes years to really grasp what has happened to your life.

We often have to explain to young people why study is useful. It’s pointless telling them that it’s for the sake of knowledge, if they don’t care about knowledge. Nor is there any point in telling them that an educated person gets through life better than an ignoramus, because they can always point to some genius who, from their standpoint, leads a wretched life. And so the only answer is that the exercise of knowledge creates relationships, continuity, and emotional attachments. It introduces us to parents other than our biological ones. It allows us to live longer, because we don’t just remember our own life but also those of others. It creates an unbroken thread that runs from our adolescence (and sometimes from infancy) to the present day. And all this is very beautiful.

I can’t wait to travel again. Travel with friends. Travel with my mother. Travel with my love. I can’t wait to experience the world with my favourite people, whilst gathering as many memories as possible and embracing the wonders that this world has to offer.

First day of class, I ask the students, by way of introduction, what they believe: Language is our best tool, or language fails to express what we know and feel. We go around the room. Almost everyone sides with failure. Is it because they’re young, still find it hard to say what they mean? Or are they romantics, holding music and art, the body, anything wordless as the best way in? I think about the poet helping his wife to die, calling his heart helpless as crushed birds and the soles of her feet the voices of children calling in the lemon grove, because the tool must sometimes be bent to work. Sitting next to my friend in her hospital bed, she tells me she’s not going to make it, doesn’t think she wants to, all year running from the deep she’s now drowning in. I change the flowers in the vase, rub cream into her hands and feet. When I lean down to kiss her goodbye, I whisper I love you, words that maybe have lost their meaning, being asked to stand for so many unspoken particulars. The sky when I walk to the parking lot this last weekend of summer is an opal, the heat pinkening above the trees which dusk turns the color of ash. Everything we love fails, I didn’t tell my students, if by fails we mean ends or changes, if by love we mean what sustains us. Language is what honors the vanishing. Or is language what slows the leaving? Or does it only deepen what we know of loss? My students believe it’s important to get the words right. Once said, they can never be retrieved. It takes years to learn to be awkward. At their age, each word must be carefully chosen to communicate the yes, but also leave room for the not really, just kidding, a gateway car with the engine running. Inside us, constellations, bit thread knotted into night’s black drape. There are no right words, if by right we mean perfect, if by perfect we mean able to save us.