imaginary tulips

“At first she tried to evade his lips but he persisted […]. All at once she gave in, and the minor miracle happened. A shiver of tenderness rippled her features, as a breeze does a reflection. Her eyelashes were wet, her shoulders shook in his clasp. That moment of soft agony was never to be repeated—or rather would never be granted the time to come back again after completing the cycle innate in its rhythm; yet that brief vibration in which she dissolved with the sun, the cherry trees, the forgiven landscape, set the tone for his new existence with its sense of ‘all-is-well’ despite her worst moods, her silliest caprices, her harshest demands. That kiss, and not anything preceding it, was the real beginning […].”

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”

When a boy…discovers that he is more given into introspection and consciousness of self than other boys his age, he easily falls into the error of believing it is because he is more mature than they. This was certainly a mistake in my case. Rather, it was because the other boys had no such need of understanding themselves as I had: they could be their natural selves, whereas I was to play a part, a fact that would require considerable understanding and study. So it was not my maturity but my sense of uneasiness, my uncertainty that was forcing me to gain control over my consciousness. Because such consciousness was simply a steppingstone to aberration and my present thinking was nothing but uncertain and haphazard guesswork.

“The duty of literature is to dig to the bottom. We are a subject not only unpredictable but unknown even to ourselves. We have an urgent need for representation and for an ethics of our own. We have the right and the duty to explore ourselves thoroughly, to slip away, to cross the borders that make us suffer. I insist on self-surveillance, which means choice, assumption of responsibility, and the necessity of losing restraint in order to know ourselves, not lose ourselves.”

“I knew what depression was. I’ve known what it was since I was at least sixteen. That was the first year in which I unequivocally wished for death: not in a melodramatic emo-kid way, but in a lumpen, constant-state-of-passive- suicidal-ideation way. I did not act out. I didn’t drink, do drugs, sleep around, or even date. I abhorred physical contact and wondered if I might be asexual; that’s how disinterested and disgusted I felt at the thought of anyone embracing me, kissing me, taking my clothes off. I was an underweight overachiever with no school spirit. “You’re so laid-back,” my friends would say. I wasn’t; I just had zero affect.”