For weeks it had been frigid cold, but now had come this December thaw.
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Closer. Please come closer. But he didn’t, he stood his ground, squinting, uncertain of himself and of me.
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Please note that I am out of the office on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and that any messages left on those days will be returned on the following Monday.
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“We can’t listen to any more baroque music. It enervates the mind. We need a beat.”
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We were meeting in the middle, I suppose.
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I got a coffee to go, which spilled over the front of my coat, as the lid wasn’t secured.
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winning is an illusion,
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If you don’t have one, then everyone is your valentine.
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Such things that disappear in time that we find ourselves longing to see again. We search for them in close-up, as we search for our hands in a dream.
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If my brother were still alive he would surely press me into action.
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Perhaps it wasn’t a lack of a book but a lack of obsession.
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I’d always wondered before if the mystery that made the beginning of romance enthralling necessarily had to vanish, or if with the right person it just lasted on.
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“We live among the dead until we join them,”
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People think disco is shallow, that it’s plastic and heartless, but they fail to hear the depth of its sadness. What else forces you to move and weep at the same time?
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I guess some people just want to drag you down with their obsessions so they don’t feel so isolated with them. But is that really the adult thing to do?
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I’d planned to do so much reading on this trip, and have got to practically none of it.
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Against the monster, I’ve always wanted meaning. Not for its own sake, because in the usual course of things, who needs the self-consciousness of it? Let meaning be immanent, noted in passing, if at all. But that won’t do when the monster has its funnel driven into the back of your head and is sucking the light coming through your eyes straight out of you into the mouth of oblivion. So like a cripple I long for what others don’t notice they have: ordinary meaning.
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The monster you lie with is your own. The struggle is endlessly private.
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His questions had no end and no answers sufficient to mollify him.
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Then he became old enough to realize his questions were childish and instead of asking them aloud, he turned them inward.
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Being up and about again, I started taking these walks. I wake early and bring Kelsey, who runs off the leash once we reach the woods. The cool oxygen of the plants and trees before the sun has dried them feels like a balm to my lungs. I’ve always preferred the woods in America to the woods where I grew up in Hampshire, which I can never help knowing are the hemmed-in exception to towns and villages and farms. New England is the other way around: a series of clearings in a forest. Keep walking north, and the clearings will shrink, until there are none. I don’t meet other people here, and that’s what matters. My mind can rest. Which is when my situation becomes obvious. There is no getting better. There is love I cannot bear, which has kept me from drifting entirely loose. There are the medicines I can take that flood my mind without discrimination, slowing the monster, moving the struggle underwater, where I then must live in the murk. But there is no killing the beast. Since I was a young man, it has hunted me. And it will hunt me until I am dead. The older I become, the closer it gets.
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But that was a lifetime ago.
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and then the liquid in my skull becomes so heavy I can barely keep my eyes open, wanting so much for it all to go away—the tight air, the words contracting like muscle over bone.
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But in his eagerness to please there is such squirming energy and a kind of literalness.
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he’s ordered a milk shake without asking if we are staying, and sucks on it noisily.
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sounding practically disconsolate now. All this is wrong. Our time can’t end like this.
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Summer is an oppression.
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Arguing is pointless. Her anger spreads in too many directions, and I am the root of it.
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It’s no surprise that boys are attracted to her. There’s a precision to her good looks, a fierceness even. That, and the way she carries herself, with a confidence bordering on aloofness.
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But Celia’s ways of coping are already the adult ones: discipline, drinking, the search for someone else to love her.
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She is being kind. As she was raised to be. To strangers and relatives and those to whom it is good to show care. That is what it has come to. She doesn’t believe anymore that I’m strong enough to bear her complaint or frustration. And I can’t blame her. If she let herself love me, she’d be furious. So she shows me kindness instead.
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My words are like knives; they cut into the people I love.
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sense a tingling in my feet and ankles and up into my calves.
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Their love hadn’t obliterated the quotidian;
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it hadn’t rid them of their workaday selves.
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Where my mind goes, my body has never followed.
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Contemplating his interior life was like staring at a velvet knockoff of an Agnes Martin painting. You needed dental work before long.
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It’s one of the upsides of avoiding ambition.
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It was this more than anything that made me realize with relief that she didn’t want to depart our cocoon of affection and commiseration any more than I did, regardless of who was sleeping with whom.
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But once he had put down his needles for the day and smoked a joint, he achieved an enviable calm while cooking vegetables for us and watching Simpsons reruns.
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But my unhappiness had become mired in a routine that obscured the obvious choice, which I kept trying to avoid.
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I wasn’t happy. This much came as no great revelation. But my unhappiness had become mired in a routine that obscured the obvious choice, which I kept trying to avoid.
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To strike up a conversation now, from nothing, would be awkward. It would lead to facts, which could only get in the way.
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Continuity, that’s what the children needed.
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“She’s a features editor. She’s not radical about anything.”
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Love was an affliction or nothing at all.
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As a counselor, my job was to make room for fears to be aired, so they could dissolve.
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When we’d first started dating, each new discovery—that I didn’t need to make weekend plans to fill empty evenings, that I had someone to talk to at the end of the day—had come as a revelation.
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The one sequence. Like a groove on a record cut too deep for the needle to climb out of. No matter what else is playing, this is always playing. That is the point of volume—to play something louder than this groove. The volume of speakers, or of obsession. The power of the sufficient dose.
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Maybe it was true after all that I would never be with anyone romantically. That my anguish, which for a time had specialized in love, had once more become indivisible from the rest of life.
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Yet for all this, these last few weeks have been the most glorious weather, cloudless skies and temperate days, perfect for being out like this in the morning, and in the early evenings during the week, when I get home from work. The light is so clear in autumn.
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I do hate not wanting to pick up my own phone when it rings.
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So what can I do but keep my sudden disappointment to myself when he steps past me and begins scraping away at what’s left.
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“Misery loves company.”
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At least as an adult, I’d shed the guilt I used to feel for not giving each and every work its earnest two-minute inspection, and allowed myself to roam freely.
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