Yuthika

“She’s drawn to me just as I’m drawn to her. She can’t keep away. She circles, forced to keep her distance, afraid of abandoning her husband and, even more, her son for too long. But she keeps coming, like a moth to my candle, staying longer than she should, leaving late for dinners and birthday parties, singeing her wings. She’s risking her marriage for me, her family, her reputation.
And I, the moth circling her candle, realize that she’s not just a candle. She’s a moth as well, circling me. I look at her and see myself reflected, my feelings, my desires. And she, looking at me, must see herself. And which of us is moth and which is candle hardly seems to matter. We’re both the same.
That’s the secret.
What moths never tell us as they whirl in their dances.
What Manucci learned at Pak Tea House.
What sufis veil in verse.
I turn her around and look into her eyes and see the wonder in them that must be in mine as well, the wonder I first saw on our night of ecstasy, and I feel myself explode, expand, fill the universe, then collapse, implode like a detonation under water, become tiny, disappear.
I’m hardly aware of myself, of her, when I open my mouth. There is just us, and I speak for us when I speak, and I must be trembling and crying, but I don’t even know if I am or what I’m doing.
I just say it.
“I love you.”
And I lose myself in her eyes and we kiss and I feel myself becoming part of something new, something larger, something I never knew could be.
Union.
There are no words.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Moth Smoke

“To him the stars seemed like so many musical notes affixed to the sky, just waiting for somebody to unfasten them.”
― Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

“We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. We have an obligation to use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside. We have an obligation to use the language. To push ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean. We must not attempt to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead thing that must be revered, but we should use it as a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time.”
― Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction

“I swear I couldn't love you more than I do right now, and yet I know I will tomorrow.”
― Leo Christopher