- if there was a time when he would want to see her again, it would certainly be then. // when both youth and flesh would have fallen away. // when there would be no time left for desire. // when only one thing would remain to be done once that meeting was over: to separate. To part from their own bodies, and thus to part forever.
- incandescent bulb
- she is sitting at the desk, like someone who has never known suffering. // not like someone who has just been crying, or is about to. // like someone who has never shattered. // as though there has never been a time when the only comfort lay in the impossibility of forever.
- step by faltering step
- that an audience was sitting there seemed wholly unreal, and she was thrown into confusion
- making her painfully aware that
- looking at herself in the mirror, she never forgot that death was hovering behind that face. Faint yet tenacious, like black writing bleeding through thin paper. // learning to love life again is a Long and complicated process
- cold and irrevocable
- and I cannot now return to the time before that knowledge
- before the day drew to a close
- their threadbare cloaks of ordinary hours. Like them, she walked without stopping. Through beauty that would disappear - was disappearing already. Mutely.
- when the night that had seemed without end is over // and the northeastern window is a swatch of deep-blue twilight, // when the sky then brightens to ultramarine and the clean bones of poplars are slowly outlined, // there will be something she wants to say to the stillness, in the early hours of Sunday morning when the building’s other inhabitants have yet to stir. /// please, a little longer like this. /// to give it time to wash me clean.
- like a soul’s fretful palpitations
- she might become aware only then of the surrounding trees, their slow reanimation as though in thrall to something, giving off a strange and stifling scent, flaring up into a still more lush proliferation, into thin air, towards the light
- were it not the case that life stretches out in a straight line, she might at some point become aware of having rounded a bend
- they want to draw out their grief for as Long as possible
- eulogised
- her spirit still had flesh to house it
- were spirits to exist, she thought, their motion would be the invisible correlate of just such a butterfly’s trembling flight
- imitated the steady gait of one who had never been broken
- she would not have lived with those shattered memories inside her, running her fingers carefully over their sharp edges
- this life needed only one of us to live it. If you had lived beyond those first few hours, I would not be living now. / my life means yours is impossible. / only in the gap between darkness and light, only in that blue-tinged breach, do we manage to make out each other’s faces
- granted all this life in my stead
- like a clutch of words strewn over white paper
- my black shoes stamped prints into the early-morning snow, a slushy layer sheeting the pavement. / like a clutch of words strewn over white paper. / Seoul, which I had last seen in summer, had frozen. / turning to look behind me, I saw the snow already sifting down to cover those just-made prints. / whitening.
- silence — when Long days finally come to a close, a time to be quiet is needed. As when, unconsciously in front of a stove, I hold my stiff hands out to the silence, fingers splayed in its scant warmth
- you who were ignorant of language
- is it because of some billowing whiteness within us, unsullied, inviolate, that our encounters with objects so pristine never fail to leave us moved?
- such is the strange comfort she receives, at that in-between time when sleep borders wakefulness, when that crisp cotton bedsheet brushes her skin
- they witnessed the day's decline
- she stopped walking and let her gaze follow theirs, to that pallid source of light which was about to flush crimson.
- impassive expression
- now and then she finds herself wondering, and not out of self-pity, but with a detached, almost idle curiosity: if you could add up all the pills she'd ever taken, what would the total be? as though life itself wished to impede her progress, she was brought up short again and again.
- those squares wrapped in white paper possessed an almost unerring perfection, surely too perfect for her.
- she isn't really partial to sweet things any more, but the sight of a dish of wrapped sugar cubes still evokes the sense of witnessing something precious. there are certain memories which remain inviolate to the ravages of time. and to those of suffering. it is not true that everything is coloured by time and suffering. it is not true that they bring everything to ruin.
- a December night unspools itself around her
- the darkness outside the window has no moon to soften it
- her sleep has been scattered and shallow
- if, by some stroke of luck, she were able to manage a longer sleep, the blue tinge of a sluggish dawn would be seeping steadily from within the black. yet those lights will be frozen white as ever, in the clarity of their stillness, in their isolation
- one theory puts it down to the fact that, for early man, the glittering of water signalled life
- foetid swamps
- felt lacerated by happiness. which would have been life. which would have been beauty.
- when darkness is imbued with even the faintest light, even things which would not otherwise be white glow with a hazy pallor.
- there is none of us whom life regards with any partiality
- everything passes. she bears this remembrance - the knowledge that everything she has clung to will fall away from her and vanish - through the streets where the sleet is falling, that is neither rain nor snow, neither ice nor water, that dampens her eyebrows and streams from her forehead whether she stands still or hurries on, closes her eyes or opens them.
- the small temple would house the woman's soul
- with those voices, those lights near at hand, our mother's ashes would lie in changeless calm inside a sealed stone drawer
- one day she took a handful of coarse salt and examined it closely. those crystals had a cool beauty, their white touched with grey. for the first time, she had a real sense of the power that lay within this material: the power to preserve, the power to sterilise and to heal.
- lie down in that Wan light
- instead of trying to sleep, I wait, feel my senses attune to the passage of time
- waiting for its contours to coalesce, to be able to read the expression it holds
- broken pediment
- where royalty once summered
- epitaph
- meaning eludes me
- the place I flee to
- that vast, soundless undulation between this world and the next, each cold water molecule formed of drenched black darkness
- seemed otherworldly
- the sea’s deep blue had the sheen of a tourist postcard
- I hold nothing dear. Not the place where I live, not the door I pass through every day, not even, damn it, my life
- a vestige of violence
- serried ranks of frozen waves
- trees shiver off their leaves, incrementally lightening their burden
- seen from behind, men and women bundled up in heavy coats are saturated with a mute presentiment, that of people beginning to endure
- mere scraps of words
- a scant couple of seconds
- while she vacillated
- the choice which many others would have quailed at
jan 23 2018 ∞
feb 11 2018 +