neen’s Reviews > Where Reasons End > Status Update

"You write in fiction, Nikolai said.
Yes.
Then you can make up whatever you want.
One never makes up things in fiction, I said. One had to live there as one has to live here.
Here is where you are, not where I am. I am in fiction, he said. I am fiction now."

"But you have to know she was only writing a poem. Just as you're writing stories here.
Yes, I said, but poems and stories are trying to speak what can't be spoken.
You always say words fall short, he said.
Words fall short, yes, but sometimes their shadow reach the unspeakable."

"People say that about the dead, that they need to be protected, only because people need an excuse for their own timidity.
How so?
Because they don't know what the dead want. And they're afraid of knowing, Nikolai said.
They're afraid of now knowing, too, I said."

"Writing fiction is to eavesdrop on your characters' heart."

"A mind that sees no path or direction to flee despair can be expanded nevertheless. Who can say if expansion may not one day make despair sufferable? I wish I could still leave some books on his desk...
Oh don't wish, he said. Wishing only wounds the heart.
What's the harm of spending a few minutes lost in wishing, I thought, when the deepest wound would remain open, day and night."

"For years he has asked me: If you write about suffering, if you understand suffering, why did you give me life? I has never given him an answer good enough."

perhaps all the reasons (happiness? hope? wonder?) despite, in spite of, the suffering is good enough for most people

"How do you know if someone wants to be in your dream? [Nikolai]
...Alas, I don't know. No one has a choice when others decide to capture him or her in their dreams.
So fundamentally dreaming is injustice inflicted upon whomever is being dreamed of?
Sometimes self-inflicted injustice, I said. People you want nothing to do with still come into your dreams."

"In my dream Nikolai was wearing his favorite blue-striped T-shirt. Mommy, I'm hungry, he said to me. The moment I heard him I woke up. Before reality and unreality were separated like night and say, darkness and lightness, I lived over and over again with his smile and his voice in my head."

"Time doesn't make sense if not for the perishable, he said."

reminded me of "There is mercy / in the way milk sours. Convenience / in the way we throw our spoils / away." ("Ode to Emptiness" by Sally Wen Mao)

"Just as none of us could go back, re-measuring the ingredients that made up days and years, repeating the steps with more care, hoping to eliminate the errors, hoping not to make new mistakes, so that this story would have turned out differently. And Nikolai would still be alive."