- I'd roam the woods for hours, until dusk or cold forced me home. These excursions were motivated half by a passion for wandering in the woods, half by a desperate loneliness that weighed me down. When I was in the woods, I felt free and released from a vague misery I didn't understand. My dream of being in the woods involved absolute silence, and every footfall that crackled leaves or snapped twigs bothered me. I wasn't happy until I found a fallen log where I could sit for a long time without moving or making sound. I wanted to be so still I would become invisible, so that the woods would return to the they'd been in before I arrived and the animals would move about as if I weren't even there. I wanted to sit so still and breath so softly that I became only a pair of eyes gazing out into the woods,alert to the fall of a leaf or the distant call of a jay. That much of my dream was bening—the fantasy of my body becoming transparent or vanishing entirely, to be replaced by nothing but focused wonder and the will to observe. It was a desire and pleasure I'd felt for years growing up in the country, miles from the nearest village.
- If there was no plan, then maybe the god who ruled this world was name Accident, a god who joyed in randomness, who ripped apart lives for no reason, who swallowed stars and toyed with the Void.
- [...] The week of Peter's death, Jonathan was scheduled to have a math test that he knew he couldn't possibly pass. That sunday evening, before he climbed into bed, he prayed to God: "God, if you just get me out of this math test, I will never ask you for anything else again. Just help me this once, please." We didn't go to school that week after the accident, and when we finally did, Jon's math test was long forgotten. As Jon sat in his room, as he watched the neighbors enter to dismantle Peter's brass bed and carry it out to be stored in the barn, as the slow days went by and he tried to comprehend what had taken place, an awful realization dawned on him: God had answered his prayer. God heard his selfish request and had granted by killing Peter.
- [...] Jon was already there, sitting in a chair outisde the principal's door. I saw that his feet didn't even reach the floor; I saw he was weeping quietly and staring at his knees.
- [...] Then I climbed the stairs and went back into my room. Closing the door made me feel safer. Not safe, but safer.
- Those serious books helped sustain me for the brief time of reading them. They were like little buoys that kept me afloat on the night sea as long as I read them. But when each book was finished, I began to sink again, to drown.
- [...] I was amazed that the words of someone long dead could affect me so. I wanted to be able to do that: to move someone with my words. And so I entered the dream of lyric poets: the dream that black scratchings on a white page can cross the huge abyss between humans, that a stranger can lift up that page years later or hundreds of miles away and be moved, troubled and brought alive by words you put there.
- I understood some things now, but also felt I understood nothing. I stood on the window ledge high above the street trying to get everything clear, trying to understand the emotional confusion inside me. But I couldn't. Instead, I just held on. And holding on, I made it through the summer.
dec 17 2018 ∞
dec 29 2018 +