b

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“may you sleep on the breast of your delicate friend”
― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

“Come to me now and loosen me
from blunt agony. Labor
and fill my heart with fire. Stand by me
and be my ally.”
― Sappho, The Complete Poems of Sappho

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed