& other sashas

the night and its slow blood,

I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort.

“It happens to me frequently. You disappear? Yes and then come back.”

“…because what isn’t shared ceases to seem quite real, perhaps even ceases to be real.”

“We looked at each other, afraid to speak, afraid to load our feelings into words in case the words cracked and split. I pinned my tongue to the roof of my mouth. Hold in, hold in, one crack and the wall is breached.”

Weak desires protect you from disappointment. But nothing keeps you safer than being a visible ruin.

I’ve missed you, [he] said, and my heart jumped at the pleasure of existing in someone else’s life

I want to be loved unreasonably by an unreasonable love because we’ve nearly drowned in the poison of reasonable loving, reasonable liking, reasonable living, reasonable essays, reasonable art and reasonable political discourse.

Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is the hole. When I desire you, a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me. So reasons the lover at the edge of eros. The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness. His thoughts turn toward questions of personal identity: he must recover and reincorporate what is gone if he is to be a complete person. […] Most people find something disturbingly lucid and true in Aristophanes’ image of lovers as people cut in half. All desire is for a part of oneself gone missing, or so it feels to the person in love.