audrey > Recent Status Updates

With performative language, saying equal doing.

At that stage of your life, there’ll be no past or future for you; …you’ll have no memory of contentment in the past nor expectation of relief in the future. …everything will reverse, and all will be right with the world. NOW is the only moment you’ll perceive; you’ll live in the present tense. In many ways, it’s an enviable state.

It’s funny: when your tranquil, you will seem to radiate light, and if someone were to paint a portrait of you like that, I’d insist that they include the halo. But when you’re unhappy, you will become a klaxon, built for radiating sound; a portrait of you then could simply be a fire alarm bell.

I won’t understand what you do there, I won’t even understand your fascination… I would prefer it if you’d pursue something without regard for it’s monetary rewards, but I’ll have no complaints… You’ll do what makes you happy, and that’ll be all I ask for.

What all think is that you’re clearly, maddeningly not me. It will remind me, again, that you won’t be a clone of me; you can be wonderful, a daily delight, but you won’t be someone I could have created by myself.

“Yeah, that’s it. Can I be made of honor?”

He showed me that you could be crazy and still be human, still be valuable, and still be loved.

I do not know when the Rebellion will come, it might be in a week or in a hundred years, but I know…that sooner or later justice will be done. Fix your eyes on that, comrades, through your the short remainder of your lives! And above all, pass on this message of mine to those who come after you, so that future generations shall carry on the struggle until it is victorious.

This was my favorite Oliver: the one who thought exactly like me.

But this thing that almost never was still beckons, I wanted to tell him. They can never undo it, never rewrite it, never unlive it, or relive it— it’s just stuck there like a vision of fireflies on a summer field toward evening that keeps saying, You could have had this instead. But going back is false. Moving ahead is false. Looking the other way is false.

We belonged to each other, but had lived so far apart that we belonged to others now. Squatters, and only squatters, were the true claimants to our lives.

“I wish I could be with you all,” I responded, getting all worked up myself over someone I had almost entirely stopped thinking about. Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.

But remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once.

His undergrad years, each time he spoke of them, acquired a limelit, incandescent magic, as if they belonged to another life, a life to which I had no access since it already belonged to the past.

…I wish that you and I and all those we’ve held dear might live forever in one house

All I knew is that I had nothing left to hide from him. I had never felt freer or safer in my life.

This was a time when I intentionally failed to drop breadcrumbs for my return journey; instead, I ate them… he could change me or ruin me forever, while time and gossip, my ultimately disembowel everything we shared and trim the whole thing down to nothing but fish bones remain. I might miss this day, or I might do far better, but I’d always know that on those afternoons in my bedroom, I had held my moment.

Perhaps we were friends first and lover second.
But then perhaps this is what lovers are.

Or does the presence of the other, who yesterday morning felt almost like an intruder, become ever more necessary because it shields us from our own hell— so that the very person who causes our torment by daybreak is the same who will relieve it at night?