Pagan Love Fest

And then he thought how there were never any do-overs. What felt like do-overs never were, because scar tissue is not elastic and it has many fewer nerve endings to feel with, or it may be numb and not feel at all. One can tell oneself that some post-catastrophe peace or measure of contentment has more value than euphoria; that arriving at some balance, some equanimity after storm, is deeper than flitting flushes of joy, because the peace is so well earned; but none of that is true. To honor a love is the only way to keep it alive. To honor anything.

She is forty-nine, and she wonders if this is what feeling old really means—not just a physical deterioration, but an interpersonal. A growing silence caused by the people you most love, who have shaped you and defined your world, going on ahead into whatever comes after. With no way out, no endgame in sight, and everyone she loves gone, she is unsure how much longer she will keep doing this.

It was a lesson he’d never forgotten. That humans only have so much emotional energy. No matter how intense the situation, or how powerful the feelings, it was impossible to maintain a heightened emotional state forever. Eventually you’d just get tired and want it to end.

There had been a few times that Miller had flirted with faith. Most had been when he was young and trying out everything. Then when he was older, wiser, more worn, and in the crushing pain of the divorce. He understood the longing for a greater being, a huge and compassionate intelligence that could see everything from a perspective that dissolved the pettiness and evil and made everything all right. He still felt that longing. He just couldn’t convince himself it was true.

Holden had once dated a Buddhist who said that death was merely a different state of being, and people only feared the unknown that lay behind that transition. Death without warning was preferable, as it removed all fear.

You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby.

Books read (2019)

Movies (Theater) 2019

It isn’t the known we fear most. The known, no matter how horrible or perilous to life and limb, is something we can wrap our brains around. We can always respond to the known. We can draw plans against it. We can learn its weaknesses and defeat it. We can recover from its assaults. So simple a thing as a bullet might suffice. But the unknown, it slips through our fingers, as insubstantial as fog.

Often, I say things I only wish were true, as though releasing the words into the world might make them so. Wishful thinking. Magical thinking, part and parcel of my unwell mind. I say things that are not true because I need them to be true. This is what liars and foolish people do. As Anne Sexton almost said, “Belief is not quite need.”