as life goes on

this is the only day you can reblog this

Language is what eases the pain of living with other people, language is what makes the wounds come open again. I have heard that anthropologists prize those moments when a word or bit of language opens like a keyhole into another person, a whole alien world roars past in some unassigned phrase. You remember Proust so appalled when Albertine lets fall “get her pot broken.” Or you hear a Berliner say “squat town”—and suddenly see sunset, winter, lovers cooking eggs in a grimy kitchen with the windows steaming up, river runs coldly by, little cats go clicking over the snow.

That’s how you know you love someone, I guess, when you can’t experience anything without wishing the other person were there to see it, too.

There is a shipwreck between your ribs and it took eighteen years for me to understand how to understand your kind of drowning. There are people who cannot be held quietly. There are screams that are never externalized. If I looked at the photo albums of your past twenty years, all I would find are decibel meter graphs of phone calls and the intensity of your silence as you sat smoking cigarettes in the garage. There is a shipwreck between your ribs. You are a box with fragile written on it, and so many people have not handled you with care. And for the first time, I understand that I will never know how to apologize for being one of them.

I was yours before I knew, and you have always been mine too.