patrick

“Not so long ago, on a trip to Morrison’s Cafeteria, she talked incessantly for the full twenty-minute drive. I blew up and told her it was wrong to keep a running monologue, selfish not to leave any space for my response. Her face went red, as if I’d seen right into her liver and heart. She knew what I saw: someone who had lost her friends, someone who told them her secrets, and thus she withdrew, or they from her, as if direct talk about, say, her dead twin brother or her gay son named after him were too much for anybody to take.

I cannot be her husband. She must know I can’t accompany her to Home Depot forever, pour shock into the hot tub, fertilize bougainvillea by the downspout. But does she say she can take care of herself on her own? That would be expecting too much. She puts her arms around me so I will feel the consequence in my body, the consequence of her losing once again. And I hug her back even harder in my attempt to do the impossible: push dark feelings out of her and leave light in their place. Maybe she thinks, Why should he get all the freedom I don’t have? Go to grad school, come back home, go off for a fellowship.

Why should his happiness spring from, depend upon, my disappointment?
What kind of logic is that?

Do you think I’m going to die, Mom? Is that why you’re sad?”
― Paul Lisicky, Later: My Life at the Edge of the World

“It is difficult to live in the present, pointless to live in the future and impossible to live in the past.”
― Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune

“The truth is you already know what it’s like. You already know
the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes
through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone
know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what
seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and
yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through
one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if
we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.

But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you
think. But what if you could? Think for a second — what if all the infinitely dense and shifting worlds of stuff inside you every moment of your life turned out now to be somehow fully open and expressible afterward,
after what you think of as you has died, because what if afterward
now each moment itself is an infinite sea or span or passage of time in
which to express it or convey it, and you don’t even need any organized
English, you can as they say open the door and be in anyone else’s
room in all your own multiform forms and ideas and facets? Because
listen — we don’t have much time, here’s where Lily Cache slopes
slightly down and the banks start getting steep, and you can just make
out the outlines of the unlit sign for the farmstand that’s never open
anymore, the last sign before the bridge — so listen: What exactly do
you think you are? The millions and trillions of thoughts, memories,
juxtapositions — even crazy ones like this, you’re thinking — that flash
through your head and disappear? Some sum or remainder of these?
Your history? Do you know how long it’s been since I told you I was a
fraud? Do you remember you were looking at the respicem watch
hanging from the rearview and seeing the time, 9:17? What are you looking at right now? Coincidence? What if no time has passed at all?*
The truth is you’ve already heard this. That this is what it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you
a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a
fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know
this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know
it’s only a part. Who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the
same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of
others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali — it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole.

So cry all you want, I won’t tell anybody.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Men had it so simple. When it wasn't about Sticking It In, it was about Having The Gun, a variation that allowed them to Stick It In from a distance.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Vineland