- The person here now isn’t the real me. Fourteen years ago I became half the person I used to be. I wish I could have met you when I was whole – that would have been wonderful. But it’s pointless to think about that now.
- I find it hard to talk about myself. […] The more I think about it, the more I’d like to take a rain check on the topic of me. What I’d like to know more about is the objective reality of things outside myself. How important the world outside is to me, how I maintain a sense of equilibrium by coming to terms with it. That’s how I’d grasp a clearer sense of who I am.
- If I’m not careful, I might end up left behind.
- I think most people live in a fiction. I’m no exception. Think of it in terms of a car’s transmission. It’s like a transmission that stands between you and the harsh realities of life. You take the raw power from outside and use gears to adjust it so everything’s all nicely in sync. That’s how you keep your fragile body intact.
- I understand what you mean by precarious. Sometimes I feel so – I don’t know – lonely. The kind of helpless feeling when everything you’re used to has been ripped away. Like there’s no more gravity, and I’m left to drift in outer space with no idea where I’m going.” / “Like a little lost Sputnik?” / “I guess so.”
- "She's so in love with me she doesn't know anything. That's why she's in love with me." - Groucho Marx
- I have this strange feeling that I’m not myself any more. It’s hard to put into words, but I guess it’s as if I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling. / My eyes tell me I'm the same old me, but something's different from usual. Not that I can clearly recall what "usual" was. [...] The me sitting here and the image of me I have are out of sync.
- We were almost boundless zeros, just pitiful little things being swept from one kind of oblivion to another.
- Her body was a mix of still-girlish elements and a budding maturity blindly wrenched open by the painful flow of time.
- And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions, but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal on their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they’re nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we’d be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.
- You're optimistic one moment, only to be wracked the next by the surety that it will all fall to pieces. And in the end it does.
- Except for a few letters, it's been a long time since I've written something purely for myself, and I'm not very confident I can express myself the way I'd like to. Not that I've ever had that confidence.
- I see now that my basic rule of thumb in writing has always been to write about things as if I didn't know them -- and this would include things that I did know, or thought I knew about. If I said from the beginning, Oh, I know that, no need to spend my precious time writing about it, [...] I run the risk of being betrayed (and this would apply to you as well). On the flip side of everything we think we absolutely understand lurks an equal amount of the unknown. Understanding is but the sum of our misunderstandings.
- I'm thinking aloud, so there's no need to wrap things up neatly. I have no moral obligations.
- Act that way and slowly but surely I will fade away. All the dawns and all the twilights will rob me, piece by piece, of myself, and before long my very life will be shaved away completely -- and I would end up nothing.
- "What's really important here," I whispered aloud to myself, "is not the big things other people have thought up, but the small things you, yourself, have."
- And I started to feel that being all alone is a terribly lonely thing.
- Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the Earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?
- What is right? Would you tell me? I don't really know what's right. I know what's wrong. But what is right?
- So that’s how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that’s stolen from us – that’s snatched right out of our hands – even if we are left completely changed people with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness.
- Maybe, in some distant place, everything is already, quietly, lost. Or at least there exists a silent place where everything can disappear, melting together in a single, overlapping figure. And as we live our lives we discover - drawing toward us the thin threads attached to each - what has been lost. I closed my eyes and tried to bring to mind as many beautiful lost things as I could. Drawing them closer, holding on to them. Knowing all the while that their lives are fleeting.
- We're both looking at the same moon, in the same world. We're connected to reality by the same line. All I have to do is quietly draw it towards me.
mar 17 2012 ∞
jun 12 2012 +
jun 12 2012 +