Jessica

“I could never have been anything if I remained with him. Don't you see? Who wants to be a helper, merely? But I don't say this. It sounds cold when in fact the opposite is true. He eclipsed everything. I handed myself over to him and he lived in me. I found it almost impossible to do anything in his presence. It occurs to me, only now, what he gave me by not saying he loved me. My solitude. He wanted what was at the heart of me to remain my own. Being with him required all my thinking and loving and force, all the time. Everything I had. It was not pure awe, because somehow it oddly gave me strength. To see into the centre of him and then into the centre of me.”
― Heidi Sopinka, The Dictionary of Animal Languages

“He knows I am a lifelong insomniac. How profound working into the night has been. It always strikes me how odd it is that we live with such divisions, that we spend half our lives lying down, in blackout.”
― Heidi Sopinka, The Dictionary of Animal Languages

“I feel joy and sorrow at once. Thinking for the first time how a work of art contains the unknown thoughts of the artist, and how everyone looking at this world will never know what was in him when this was made. Even me.”
― Heidi Sopinka, The Dictionary of Animal Languages

“In order to forget one life, you need to live at least one other life. The young can withstand the shock of love because another life is still possible. It is only the old who die of heartbreak.”
― Heidi Sopinka, The Dictionary of Animal Languages