Status Updates From Joy Ride

All I yearn for was some confirmation that those memories existed and I mattered, because otherwise they were a broken circuit within me as if I had the lock, but not the key closure wasn’t really what I wanted: I knew there would never be a tallying of accounts or an attempt to find the sum of our life together.

That lesson from the tall mood about each person containing the universe and how, when that person is gone, their individual universe stop spinning. It was the one argument with existence that you could never win.

Those memories were now scorched, indecipherable, as foreign as a language I once spoke fluently, but no longer understood. After we signed our divorce agreement, I never saw Peter again for the rest of his life.

I can say only that I came to understanding them, mysterious magnetism of cruelty, that makes a mark on someone, emotional, or otherwise, seems like it should be repellent, but often has a terrible effect of forming a bond, as if the scar tissue is adhesive.

Every betrayal is unique, but they all have a pattern, a wave form, a surging a crashing that sucks you below the waterline and then pitches you, breathless and wet with tears onto the sand. Some people find their footing and dash away before the next wave reaches them.

I thought believing was what you did when you loved someone

As included in the “instructions for living a life “set out by poet Mary Oliver, pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.

Everyone benefits from stepping back, and consider considering what and why they do the things they do, whatever it is that they do.
We were a canoe, balancing on a hair, but I persuaded myself we were on solid ground.

We write to express the worrying in our heads, the thousand thoughts, and impressions that are private, internal, invisible, until they spill out into being, made present through language. Talking does that, and writing does it, in a more permanent way.

Being a writer requires having the confidence to think you have something to say, but it almost always linked with the neediness of wanting the audience to hear and approve it. That makes can be brutal.

At worst, I would’ve been turned down, but besides disappointment and light bruising to my ego, it wouldn’t have been so bad. What would’ve been terrible was not making the effort to see if maybe it was meant to be.

Absolute truth, in the sense of a flawless capture of information, doesn’t need to be the goal. Imperfect recollection is the best we can do, and it’s valuable, even with its laws and limitations. In fact, those limitations are part of every story, since they are part of the real human experience– the mess, the misinterpretation, the variation and imperfect nature of perception interpretive versions of reality

All I needed was to feel my own curiosity rumbling. I always liked being a student and I love telling people when I learned something intriguing so that was my stance,. I looked around me, saw something I was curious about, figured out how to find out about it, and when I felt I’ve learned thoroughly, I told readers what I’ve learned.

I remember once reading how the music you hear when you’re in your early teens says an outside impact on your sense of what is good musically: it brings you deeply, and printing the way no subsequent music ever will, and you measure all music there after by how much it does or doesn’t deviate from that music of your teens

That each of us contains an unimaginably rich world, a full universe of thoughts, and knowledge and aspirations and reveries, stories and memories and perceptions and emotions; that the sum of each person is an entire galaxy, unique hole.

In each of these scenarios, I, or at least the eye that I turned out to be, wouldn’t exist. It was like writing my own horror stories, imagining a jagged hole in the world that might not existence would leave.

I paid for my clowning with stomach aches and headaches, and my hyper alertness to strife. I was always primed to perform in hopes of breaking up a fight. I told myself stories to divert myself from worrying about my parents. I played out different scenarios in my life, imagining what would have become of me if my mother‘s family had stayed and hungry. Or they had stayed in Mexico. Or if my mother had married her

Chapter 2 – I became a tuned to any ripple of discord around me – hypervigilance that is useful for a writer but hell on one’s nerves.

It captured the way a person’s death or memory loss takes with it a vast internal library, and how the disappearance of a library feels like a death for the people it serves

Senegalese expression used to express that someone had died: you say his or her library has burned