Inez Karkabe

“So many are alive who don’t seem to care. Casual, easy, they move in the world as though untouched.   But you take pleasure in the faces of those who know they thirst. You cherish those who grip you for survival.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“Don't go far off, not even for a day,
because I don't know how to say it - a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in
an empty station when the trains are
parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because then
the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve
on the beach, may your eyelids never flutter
into the empty distance. Don't LEAVE me for
a second, my dearest, because in that moment you'll
have gone so far I'll wander mazily
over all the earth, asking, will you
come back? Will you leave me here, dying?”
― Pablo Neruda