камни

Suddenly it occurred to me that nothing might be happening. I’d done that before. I had added meaningful layers to things that were meaningless many, many times before.

I learned that just beneath the surface there’s another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn’t find the proof. It was just a kind of feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force—a wild pain and decay—also accompanies everything.

Lying on the sofa with my eyes closed, I didn’t want to see it this way, everything eating everything in the end. We know how the light works, we know where the sound is coming from. Verse. Chorus. Verse. I’m sorry. We know how it works. The world is no longer mysterious.

I know you’re tired but come, this is the way.

Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women, kitchen of love, bedroom of grief, bathroom of apathy. Sometimes, the men, they come with keys, and sometimes the men, they come with hammers.

I am divided from all things by a hollow space and I don’t even push myself to the limits of it.

Walking streets alone and eating dinner at tables for one — maybe with a book, maybe not — you’re left alone for hours, days on end with nothing but your own thoughts. You start talking to yourself, asking yourself questions and answering them, and taking in the day’s activities with a slowness and an appreciation that you’ve never before even attempted. Even just going to the grocery store — when in an exciting new place, when all by yourself, when in a new language — is a thrilling activity. And having to start from zero and rebuild everything, having to re-learn how to live and carry out every day activities like a child, fundamentally alters you. Yes, the country and its people will have their own effect on who you are and what you think, but few things are more profound than just starting over with the basics and relying on yourself to build a life again. I have yet to meet a person who I didn’t find calmed by the experience. There is a certain amount of comfort and confidence that you gain with yourself when you go to this new place and start all over again, and a knowledge that — come what may in the rest of your life — you were capable of taking that leap and landing softly at least once.

One day you will wake up and there won’t be any more time to do the things you’ve always wanted to do. Do it now.

It is all loneliness, the way you live. You get up and make the bed like you are trying to prove a point. You make coffee that is never quite right and never finish it. This is the third day you’ve worn this shirt. Eventually, you will paint your nails again, wash the grease from your hair. Once you have someone besides your own reflection to impress. You go to parties where you know you will only stay an hour. Lean quietly against the wall, watching people with enviably easy laughter. Your smile is a cracked boat in a flooded river. Close, but still useless. You do not talk to strangers, just sit there like a begging dog beside the dinner table, with eyes that say “Please, come, be my friend. I am a coward, but I’m hungry.”

I am the sea and nobody owns me.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?

know this: you can start over, each morning.

I wish people were all trees and I think I could enjoy them then.