Lost In Books

We don't have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that's what I want in life.

Death is not easy to escape,  let him who will attempt it. Man must go to the grave that awaits him-- fate has ordained this for all who have souls.

I broke. I looked and fell down the stairs, past my life and landed on something soft but it was just an illusion; it was like the dream right before I thought I was dying. I fooled myself into feeling beautiful and tranquil. I surrounded myself by the one that I loved and ignored the blood pouring from my chest. I turned it into a warm rainstorm. Pain and dying will do that. It will have you singing yourself lullabies and rocking back and forth, there and back, until you fall asleep, fooled and falling in love with a memory as you lay there dying.

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

It was like hearing every goodbye ever said to me-- said all at once.

Take the light inside you like a blessing, like a knee in the chest, holding onto it and not letting it go. Now let it go.

I feel like I'm traveling and traveling with nowhere to go back to.

I was much too far out all my life And not waving but drowning.

But when I wakened, the air was so raw. I was a raggedy old cloth doll battered and banged and wrung and tossed down. I was so tired and so old. Wanting only to return into the blue forever.

I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.

It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur of epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-- time and space and the heart's weariness are the blander executioners of human connection.

And yet now I find that writing about a friendship that flourished within the realm of connection and routine has all the components of trying to capture air. The dailiness of our alliance was both muted and essential: We were the lattice that made room for the rose.

I was equal parts bluff and fear, I think, poised there on the verge of a life unfolding, not knowing whether I would leap or fall.

I would be the sensitive heroine, or doomed romantic, or radical bohemian-- I was Hamlet, Icarus, Edith Wharton's Lily Bart. God forbid that I simply face who I was, which was somebody drunk and scared and on my way to being no one at all.