To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.

“Longing is the place of exile. Our love is a place of exile. Poetry is a place of exile. We dream and forget where we were when we wake.”

“If two people love the same thing, she reasoned, then they must love each other, at least a little, even if they never say it.”

She is your last and true and only love, he thought, and that’s not evil. It is only unfortunate.