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I just wanted to be told that I hadn’t lost my mind. I’ve lost so much. I think there’s something wrong in being—what I’ve become—something really wrong. I mean, I think there’s something wrong with allowing oneself to become so lonely. I think that I was proud that I could bear it. Each day became a kind of test—to see if I could bear it.

He wasn’t at all line I thought he was. He fell on—fell on me—like life and death. My God. His chest, his belly, the rising and the falling, the moans. How he clung, how he struggled—life and death! Life and death! Why did it all seem to me like tears?

He lay beside me on that bed like a rock. As heavy as a rock—like he’d fallen—fallen from a high place—fallen so far and landed so heavy, he seemed almost to be sinking out of sight—with one knee pointing to heaven. My God.

I used to watch you roaring through this town like a St. George thirsty for dragons. And I wanted to let you know you haven’t got to do all that; dragons aren’t hard to find, they’re everywhere. And nobody wants you to be St. George. We just want you to be Parnell. But, of course, that’s much harder.

I will not let you go until you give me a sign! A sign that in the terrible Sahara of our time a fountain may spring, the fountain of true morality, and bring us closer, oh, my Lord, to that peace on earth desired by so few throughout so many ages. Let not our suffering endure forever. Teach us to trust the great gift of life and learn to love one another and dare to walk the earth like men.

But it is not the past which makes our hearts so heavy. It is the present. Lord, where is our hope? Who, or what, shall touch the hearts of this headlong and unthinking people and turn them back from destruction?

Everyone under the sound of my voice, and many more souls than that, feel as I feel, and tremble as I tremble, and bleed as I bleed.

Jo: What happened?
Parnell: Nothing happened. We got so we told each other everything. She was going to be a painter, I was going to be a writer. It was our secret. Nobody in the world knew about her inside, what she was like, and how she dreamed, but me. And nobody in the world knew about me inside, what I wanted, how I dreamed, but her. But we couldn’t look ahead, we didn’t dare.

He took all my attention—the deepest attention, maybe, that one person can give another. He needed me and he made a difference for me in this terrible world—do you see what I mean? And—it’s funny—when I was with him, I didn’t think of the future, I didn’t dare.

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended:
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream

I’ll follow you. I’ll lead you about a round,
Through bog, through bush, through brake, through brier.
Sometime a horse I’ll be, sometime a hound,
A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire,
And neigh, and bark, and grunt, and roar, and burn,
Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn.

That’s not significant, it’s just a detail. Meaning it’s just as significant as anything else.

In the final weeks, bronze arrived in Kathleen’s tone as concrete built in mine.
We broke up at a culturally inappropriate gaucho café during the first storm of the summer. The final conversation was gentle. We were laminated in rain.

The world seemed kinder at night, and she was more susceptible to that kindness. Like the moon lilies that wait until the sun has set to speak.

Thinking about it now, however, divorce is more procedure than experience. A removal that produces a scar. One thing gone, one added. Something moves on, something remains. Which is why anything can be haunted as long as there is residual memory and a location, and a location can be a seashore, a truck cab, a body, a peach.

Jo is battered by the desire to protect this heavy, unwilling thing and understands that this battering is love. She must allow it do to whatever it wants to her when she calls-

Several weeks passed and neither boy found out another the other, and nothing deeply romantic transpired between either couple other than the romance of long conversations connecting their lives and opinions and experiences

and the reason she cannot remember these details is not that time itself has fogged over the memory, but because her need for self-mythology has taken over

so as Marie felt her thigh pressed against this woman’s thigh and as she looked at this familiar face—the feminine version of K’s face—she knew on a visceral, unreachable, nauseating level that she would love this woman more than she would love anyone, and at the same time she knew she was bound to lose her someday, bound to be destroyed by that loss, bound to hurtle toward it anyway, unable to outrun entropy

And there it was, that honeyed disdain that can develop between two people who know each other intimately yet still fall short of telling the most intimate truths.

And that ends it. Edie’s eyes well up and Marie goes to hold her, softly first then firmer and firmer until whatever it is has passed. This is why people know each other.

Marie opens her cupboard where a cluster of teacups huddle on a shelf too small to contain them. She picks the light blue one, the one she’s partial to, crude and mass produced, saved from a stoop in a rich person’s neighborhood, one of those piles of abandoned objects that couldn’t live up to the lives of their owners. Almost everything in Marie’s apartment has been defined by such rejection.

What good had lingual fluency ever done for me when it came to love? I feel like I’m getting away with something, I had told him, though what I meant was I felt something for which I had no words. What is this? he asked me all afternoon, all evening, that night, and the next morning, though I think he meant he knew exactly what this was.

When writing moves on its own authority, it has the same inevitability of good sex. Not much thought is given to what sentence comes next, to where to put this or that hand, to what to do with your mouth. My hands, when the writing is going well, seem to be animated by my subconscious, just as they do when the fucking is going well. One subconscious touching another subconscious—perhaps it’s never more than that.

Reality at large has never been my subject, but interiority always has been. The interiority of a person filling out forms or sitting on the stool or chewing cabbage or fucking may or may not illuminate something of value of that character; the answer comes only in context.

Now there’s no one who knows how happy we were up there, he said, looking up at the same fire escape that would have saved their lives if it ever needed to. In her last days she didn’t want to see her first husband or almost anyone else. Standing there on the street, Sasha trembled.

Much has been written on the subject of crying in Manhattan, as writers tend to cry in public, and writers tend to congregate in New York City, and anyway, you could make the argument that half if not all published writing is a form of crying in public.

and all the while I kept writing down the facts, the sometimes barely believable facts of how much seemed to be changing, eroding, losing control, and I began to wonder if this has always been the reason I’ve written anything at all—to break reality down into a story, or to make a story into a reality.

For many years I found my grandmother’s total amnesia of this pivotal moment of her life to be humorous veering on tragic, but now it seems logical to simply forget painful memories that have nothing else to teach you.

Hope is visible in the objects in our homes. Identities and plans rest dormant in a stack of books. The kitchen pantry reassures us of our future nourishment. A toolbox is the confidence that we can fix what will break. Little notes to self. Little notes of self. The secret language of things we use to fold life into time, time into life.