( sideblog for musings )

There's something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.

I suppose it's not a compromise if only one of you considers it such.

Love is the world's infinite mutability; lies, hatred, murder even, are all knit up in it; it is the inevitable blossoming of its opposites, a magnificent rose smelling faintly of blood.

Yes, I can see her almost perfectly in this cracked darkness.

Not following her is the hardest thing I've ever done.

Here is the girl I love and cannot follow.

And maybe by imagining these futures we can make them real, and maybe not, but either way we must imagine them. The light rushes out and floods in.

I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe ships sink, or maybe we're grass--our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is still alive. We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you're imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you're saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean?... I like the strings. I always have. Because that's how it feels. But the strings make pain seem more fatal than it is, I think. We're not as frail as the strings would make us believe. And I like the grass, too. The grass got me to you, helped me imagine you as an actual person. But we're not different sprouts from the same plant. I can't be you. You can't be me. You can imagine another well--but never quite perfectly, you know?

Yeah, I know. I'm not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.

I must ask the wounded man where he is hurt, because I cannot become the wounded man. The only wounded man I can be is me.

It's like she thinks my job is to please her, and that should by my dearest wish, and when I don't please her--I get shut out.

I think the future deserves our faith.

You had been a paper boy to me all these years--two dimensions as a character on the page and two different, but still flat, dimensions as a person. But the night you turned out to be real. And it ends up being so odd and fun and magical that I go back to my room in the mourning and I just miss you. I want to come over and hang out and talk.

I realize that the idea is not only wrong but dangerous. What a treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person.

I'm just saying that it was easy for me to like [her] before. It's easy to like someone from a distance. But when she stopped being this amazing unattainable thing or whatever, and started being, like, just a regular girl with a weird relationship with food and frequent crankinesss who's kinda bossy--then I had to basically start liking a whole different person.