Jake

“We will never fight again, our lovely, quick, template-ready arguments. Our delicate cross-stitch of bickers.

The house becomes a physical encyclopedia of no-longer hers, which shocks and shocks and is the principal difference between our house and a house where illness has worked away. Ill people, in their last day on Earth, do not leave notes stuck to bottles of red wine saying ‘OH NO YOU DON’T COCK-CHEEK’. She was not busy dying, and there is no detritus of care, she was simply busy living, and then she was gone.

She won’t ever use (make-up, turmeric, hairbrush, thesaurus).

She will never finish (Patricia Highsmith novel, peanut butter, lip balm).

And I will never shop for green Virago Classics for her birthday.

I will stop finding her hairs.


I will stop hearing her breathing.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

“Only the middle ground of this wicked world mattered, the vast gap that stretched between, and those who were born with enough grit to brave it.”
― David Joy, Where All Light Tends to Go

“I had asked Hunter once, when he was in a rare calm mood, 'Do you know when you're about to change? Are you aware of it?' Hunter said, 'Sandy, do you know what it's like? I'm just standing here, and I have a sense that something is about to happen. And then I start to turn my head, and it's here. The monster's here.”
― Jann S. Wenner, Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson

“I'm so busy listening to the heart that I don't even hear when somebody asks me to pass the salt.”
― Frederik Pohl, Gateway