words are life, liesel

It is always important to know when something has reached its end. Closing circles, shutting doors, finishing chapters, it doesn’t matter what we call it; what matters is to leave in the past those moments in life that are over.

“You can destroy your now by worrying about tomorrow.”

“Please come to bed and let me see you and feel you.”

I have ignored you for a year or ten, finally severing the root, purging, drying out the heart:          go.

Things we didn’t talk about in courtship: night terrors, God, where we’d spend Christmases, abortion, how I love to be the last girl to leave the party, bulimia, what made your exes cry, narcissistic injuries.

“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?”

It was never you. It was always you: / your unutterable name, this growl in my throat.

In the dream where I am an island, / I grow green with hope. I’d like to end there.

Each time / I enter a memory, it changes with my entrance.

I would like damn well to hear your voice again.

“I am my heart’s undertaker. Daily I go and retrieve its tattered remains, place them delicately into its little coffin, and bury it in the depths of my memory, only to have to do it all again tomorrow.”

“I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.”

I realize full well how hard it must be to go on living alone in a place from which someone has left you, but there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.

“He was in her thoughts – a deep tender sultry garden.”

“Her solitude is desertlike.”

…a weeping, unhealable wound,