I Think I Saw You In My Sleep

People get tired of you being sad.

Will you love me in December as you do in May?

The snake enters your dreams through paintings: this one, of a formal garden in which there are always three: the thin man with the green-white skin that marks him vegetarian and the woman with a swayback and hard breasts that look stuck on and the snake, vertical and with a head that’s face-coloured and haired like a woman’s. Everyone looks unhappy, even the few zoo animals, stippled with sun, even the angel who’s like a slab of flaming laundry, hovering up there with his sword of fire, unable as yet to strike. There’s no love here. Maybe it’s the boredom. And that’s no apple but a heart torn out of someone in this myth gone suddenly Aztec. This is the possibility of death the snake is offering: death upon death squeezed together, a blood snowball. To devour it is to fall out of the still unending noon to a hard ground with a straight horizon and you are no longer the idea of a body but a body, you slide down into your body as into hot mud. You feel the membranes of disease close over your head, and history occurs to you and space enfolds you in its armies, in its nights, and you must learn to see in darkness. Here you can praise the light, having so little of it: it’s the death you carry in you red and captured, that makes the world shine for you as it never did before. This is how you learn prayer. Love is choosing, the snake said. The kingdom of god is within you because you ate it.

That’s the worst way to miss somebody. When they’re right beside you and you miss them anyway.

How someone reacts to your sadness says a lot about how long they’re going to be in your life.