library fairy

She holds out his arm even though she's angry with him. She is so often angry with him she can't afford to act on it anymore. So she holds him fiercely. Calls him sweet names. Feels her anger in her eyes, making ugly things uglier, the greasy dust on the bolts of fabric in the store window she is passing.

Despair is her dramatic art, statements like all she wants of a place is the right to go crazy without anyone staring.

. . . I'm languid with too little sleep, sliding needle into vein as slowly and tenderly as a lover.

In her place, I imagine, I would burst open, unfurl  into a bouquet of velvet flowers.

. . . Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we're not always so glad to be here, it's our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open.

. . . I don't care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is  some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here's the truth: life is catastrophe.

If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away?

. . . everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet - for me, anyway - all that's worth living for lies in that charm?

. . . if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think and feel, you don't think, 'oh, I love this picture because it's universal.' 'I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.' That's not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It's a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes, you.

It was rosepetals I wanted to throw, not a poison dart.

Time destroyed us all soon enough. But to destroy, or lose, a deathless thing - to break bonds stronger than the temporal - was a metaphysical uncoupling all its own, a startling new flavor of despair.

Why did anyone ever worry about anything? Weren't we, as sentient beings, put upon the earth to be happy, in the brief time allotted to us?

. . . I felt I understood the secret grandeur of dying, all the knowledge held back from all humankind until the very end: no pain, no fear, magnificent detachment, lying in state upon the death barge and receding into the grand immensities like an emperor, gone, gone, observing all the distant scurryers on shore, freed from all the old human pettiness of love and fear and grief and death.

. . . the only point of reference was the moon, riding high above the clouds, which though bright and full seemed weirdly unstable somehow, void of gravity, not the pure anchoring moon of the desert but more like a party trick that might pop out at a conjurer's wink or else float away into the darkness and out of sight.