Kindly Collapses

I have not forgotten you — the nights are long and difficult.

Have you ever seen death? Do you know what love is? Have you ever died of longing? Been eaten up by ambition? Choked on jealousy? Wept for joy? Bitten your finger out of pain?

It's hard for people to understand each other. They'll be taking new jobs, participating in the life of a new collective, but — when they go away — will anyone be able to say a word about them? Over the course of a year, a thousand people will know their faces, only a few will know their names, and no one will know their thoughts. Reactions, not motives, count in casual contacts. They go away and so replacements must be found. They arrive, so they must be hired. Is there even any need for probing into the depths of a man? Decoding fates that he himself cannot explain? What is that I want? I myself have nothing more to say about them. What connects us? Two kilometres of road? The inn?

I'm nothing but your dream.

It was not that life culminated in death, but that death preceded death.

Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are. We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still. Lovers, farmers, and artists have one thing in common, at least — a fear of 'dry spells', dormant periods in which we do no blooming, internal droughts only the waters of imagination and psychic release can civilise. All such matters are delicate of course. But a good irrigator knows this: too little water brings on the weeds while too much degrades the soil the way too much easy money can trivialise a person's initiative. In his journal Thoreau wrote, 'A man's life should be as fresh as a river. It should be the same channel but a new water every instant.'

When music penetrates loneliness, it takes away a person's pain.

No one has ever stared more tenderly or more fixedly after you... I kiss you — across hundreds of separating years.

I feel numb. Numb in all this vividness. I don't seem to occupy my life fully.

Thank you for loving me like this, for you feel love, although you do not know it.

I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.

True solace is finding none, which is to say, it is everywhere.

My life felt flat, then euphoric, then flat again. These fluctuations gained momentum like a paddlewheel: I was dry and airy, then immersed again.

I am adrift, there is no shore, no boundary to pain — everyone who ever lived is a forfeit.

Now let me say again, wearily — don't be too eager to hear this — your soul now stands in the way of my own.

I love you. I'm glad I exist.