AURORA

“We were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly.”

“I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth.”

““Life with you was lovely—and when I say lovely, I mean doves and lilies, and velvet, and that soft pink ‘v’ in the middle and the way your tongue curved up to the long, lingering ‘l.’ Our life together was alliterative, and when I think of all the little things which will die, now that we cannot share them, I feel as if we were dead too.”

“And I, within my slumber’s blueness, / confused reality with dream.”

“The sky–that blueness gone mad from the heat, and the sand, hot like cream of wheat.”

“My love for you was the throbbing, welling warmth of tears. That is exactly how I imagined paradise: silence and tears, and the warm silk of your knees. This you could not comprehend.”

“You came into my life — not as one comes to visit … but as one comes to a kingdom where all the rivers have been waiting for your reflection, all the roads, for your steps.”

“I dreamt of you last night—as if I was playing the piano and you were turning the pages for me.”

“You’re always you, and that don’t change, and you’re always changing, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“Recently, my son said to me after seeing a ballet on television: ‘It’s beautiful, but I don’t like it.’ And I thought, Are many grown-ups capable of such a distinction? It’s beautiful, but I don’t like it. Usually, our grown-up thinking is more along the lines of: I don’t like it, so it’s not beautiful. What would it mean to separate those two impressions for art making and for art criticism?”