#library notes

"My memories don't feel as though they've been pulled up by the root. Even if they fade, something remains. Like tiny seeds that might germinate again if the rain falls. And even if a memory disappears completely, the heart retains something. A slight tremor or pain, some bit of joy, a tear."

"I sometimes wonder what I'd see if I could hold your heart in my hands," I told him. "I imagine it fitting perfectly in my palms, soft and slippery, like gelatin that hasn't quite set. It might wobble at the slightest touch, but I'd sense I'd need to hold it carefully, so it wouldn't slip through my fingers. I also imagine the warmth of the thing. It's usually hidden deep inside, so it's much warmer than the rest of me. I close my eyes and sink into that warmth, and when I do, the sensations of all the things that have disappeared come back to me. I can feel all the things you remember, there in my hands. Doesn't that sound marvelous?"

We each had to live our own battles. We could hardly give up and die; and if we had to live, we'd have to rely on what we were made of.

[...]But we're still here. You can't compare yourself with when things were fine or good. It's better to remember how far we've come from the worst time. Then your dreams will be nothing to be scared of.

In some ways, whether we lived together here or not, we could never get back to where we'd been before, whatever we did. I knew we'd have to carry this for the rest of our lives. Even when there were brighter times that made it seem like we'd been able to forget for a moment, at the bottom of it there was always that shadow. We already knew from painful experience that life was about walking forward carrying the weight of it all. Even when we cried and raged until our throats were ragged and bleeding, there was no relief. We just carried on, pretending it didn't hurt.

He smiled slightly, and she amended her words: "What you're doing is building a horrible kind of logic. People read what you write and say, 'Yes, he is talking about things that really happen,' and they keep reading, and it makes sense to them. You're explaining things that can't be defended, and the explanations themselves are mad, just bizarre--but you offer them with such confidence. It was because she kept the chain on the door; it was because he needed to let off steam after a hard day's scraping and bowing at work; it was because she was irritating and stupid; it was because she lied to him, made a fool of him; it was because she had to die, she just had to, it makes dramatic sense; it was because 'nothing is more poetic than the death of a beautiful woman'; it was because of this, it was because of that. It's obscene to make such things reasonable.