theorionhunter’s Reviews > The Möbius Book > Status Update

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.