e q u i p o i s e

I’d forgotten that all runaway stories end like this. Everyone goes home. Dorothy clicks her way back to Kansas, Ulysses sails his way home to his wife, Holden Caulfield breaks into his own apartment … You think you can’t go home again? It’s the only place you can ever go.

“Words provided to me—loss, grief, sorrow, bereavement, trauma—never seemed to be able to speak precisely of what was plaguing me. One can and must live with loss and grief and sorrow and bereavement. Together they frame this life, as solid as the ceiling and the floor and the walls and the doors. But there is something else, like a bird that flies away at the first sign of one’s attention, or a cricket chirping in the dark, never settling close enough for one to tell from which corner the song comes.”

“You ache. You ache all over. You are aching to be you, but you’re scared of what it means to do so.”

“You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man or any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: The gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose… That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself? Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the light of sunrise and sunset, to buy safety for yourself - safety forever?”

i know we all want to believe that any of us / can survive alone

“I found the Muse in myself. And I loved Her fiercely.”

“My grief and I are still so ill-acquainted; two strangers sharing one body. We bump into each other while reaching for the toothbrush, while walking the dog across the street. And I’m so close to recognizing her, I’ve listened to her cry at the bottom of the bathtub and watched her rub her eyes at a funeral. I want to tell her it’s all okay, I’m here too, and we can be here together, I am just too afraid to speak.”

The problem begins with that word ‘world’. It means two such opposite things. The real one we cannot see. The invented one we can’t escape.