"..."

Homesickness is absolutely nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. You don't really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don't have, or haven't been able to find.

“Oh damn them all, thought the adolescent. Damn the bright lights by which no one reads, damn the continuous music which no one hears, damn the grand pianos that no one can play, damn the white houses mortgaged up to their rain gutters, damn them for plundering the ocean for fish to feed the mink whose skins they wear and damn their shelves on which there rests a single book—a copy of the telephone directory, bound in pink brocade. Damn their hypocrisy, damn their cant, damn their credit cards, damn their discounting the wilderness of the human spirit, damn their immaculateness, damn their lechery and damn them above all for having leached from life that strength, malodorousness, color and zeal that give it meaning. Howl, howl, howl.”

There’s also a selfish belief lurking within me that if I don’t talk about it, if I don’t remember it, my chest will shatter open and spill it all out, and one day, I’ll forget how it felt when he looked at me.

There it was, then, the intractable problem of her life: No matter what she did, all her best efforts to remake her life would always be a little bit spoiled, because the best things would never feel like home.

I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race— that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.

The words piled on my heart like stones and I thought how much I wanted to be like the river, which had no memory, and how little like the earth, which could never forget.

I told him I stopped because I realized I was turning love into an accomplishment, and he was turning accomplishment into love, and neither of those things would ever quite be the other.