Ellie Dunham > Recent Status Updates

Coup de coeur : blow to the heart

And just as music is the space between notes, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain Nile and throws a prism of color across the sky—so the space where I exist and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

It’s not about the outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn’t understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out.

The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag

When I was was a boy, after my mother died, I always tried hard to hold her in my mind as I was falling asleep so maybe I’d dream of her, only I never did. Or, rather, I dreamed of her constantly, only as absence, not presence

…it was not ammusing to her to see how torn-up I was over her.

I never had the feeling that other people listened to me half as closely; I felt like a different person in her company, a better one, could say things to her I couldn’t say to anyone else, certainly not Kitsey, who had a brittle way of deflating serious comments by making a joke or switching to another topic, or interrupting, or sometimes just pretending not to hear.

Theo is delusional

THEO!!! I think he’s pathetic for saying with her. But I do think she made a good argument.

What you want to live and be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life and lets you have yours.

Aw man, poor Theo. Kitsey two timing him and he had NO idea :(

There’s a doubleness. You see the mark, you see the paint for the paint, and also the living bird.

Thoughtfully, Mrs. Barbour pursed her lips, with heavy-looking eyes —and all at once, I got it. She was tired. She hadn’t been expecting to have to sit around and entertain me, only she was too polite to say so.

Hmmm I think Theo’s missed the mark on this one.

And it was awful to learn, by having it so suddenly vanish from under me, that all my adult life is been privately sustained by that great, hidden, savage joy: the conviction that my whole life was balanced atop a secret that might at any moment blow it apart.

The painting had made me feel less mortal, less ordinary. It was support and vindication; it was sustenance and sum. It was the keystone that had held the whole cathedral up.

I am shook. But now that I’ve let it sink in, it makes sense and I’m mad I didn’t figure it out sooner. This makes everything so much better.

On our way to a party. Chanel No. 19, baby blue dress. We’d stepped out on Park Avenue —both a little looped from cocktails upstairs —and the street lights had snapped on the moment we stepped out the door and we’d stopped dead and looked at each other: did we do that? The moment was so funny we both began laughing hysterically —it was like the light was pouring off us, like we could power up Park Avenue.

I’d unboxed so much china from funeral sales and broken-up households that there was something almost unspeakably sad about the pristine, gleaming displays, with their tacit assurance that shiny new tableware promised an equally shiny and tragedy-free future.

It was one think to see a painting in a museum but to see it in all those lights and moods and seasons was to see it a thousand different ways and to keep it shut in the dark —a thing made of light, that only lived in light —was wrong in more ways than I knew how to explain. More than wrong: it was crazy.

I’m proud of Theo for telling Hobie the truth

Somehow, even shrouded and entombed in the storage locker, it had worked itself free and into some fraudulent public narrative, a radiance that glowed in the mind of the world.