i think about these a lot

general

• ‘what do one do with a life when one had expected to be dead?’ - marya hornbacher
• 'And what is God other than an answer or a reason in the dark?'
  • somebody you love is gone, gurjinder basran

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• 'Our bodies carry our memories of them, in our muscles, in our skin, in our bones. My children are right here.' She pointed to the inside curve of her elbow. 'Where I held them when they were babies. Even if there comes a time when I don't know who they are anymore, I believe I will feel them here. / 'Where do you hold your wife?' she asked Tom. / Tom looked at Isabelle, his eyes full. He put his right hand to the side of his own face, then took it away and readjusted the shape slightly. / 'That is her jawline,' he said softly, running his left index finger along the half-circle at the base of his hand, then along the top curve where his hand met his fingers. 'And here is her cheekbone.'
• Ian stood in the kitchen, waiting for Antonia, every sense in his body awake and completely alive, and thought that if the stars were suddenly to fall in a great, glorious burst into his kitchen, he would hardly be surprised.
  • the school for essential ingredients, erica bauermeister

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• Sometimes I notice tiny scars beneath your coat, tiny claw slashes and teeth prints. A few bits of your ears are missing, a few bits of your face. Can you remember how you lost them? Do you dream about it, as I do? I see how you move your left brow up and down and left and right in coordination with the expression on your face. I notice how still you blink your eye hollow. Do you miss your missing eye, I wonder. Have you even realised it's gone?
• I never expected it would take so much reversing to make a straight line.
• We'll go when the wind is high and the seas are storming, when the mud is fluid and deep and the rain so constant that the trees afford no shelter as they should, but instead send an onslaught of accumulated droplets down on our heads. Still we'll go this way, I promise.
• Where were you last winter? I find it hard to picture a time when we were simultaneously alive, yet separate. Now you are like a bonus limb. Now you are my third leg, an unlimping leg, and I am the eye you lost.
  • spill simmer falter wither, sara baume

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• I picture the mouse trying to swim, to scrabble back out. ... Her back legs are splayed as if she had been kicking at the instant her heart stopped. As if, in the instant which came before the stopping of her heart, she learned to swim, a second too late.
• Every time I take the train, I buy a coffee from the snack trolley and the trolley attendant asks me the same question: 'sugar or milk?' And I reply: 'no, neither, thanks.' And he or she then presents me with, alongside my coffee, a stirring stick. I probably wouldn't have noticed if it had happened only once, or if it was always the same attendant, but this is not so. Whoever it is, every single time, they make the same mistake. I've been gathering these sticks for seven years now. ... They are a project. I have not yet decided how to display them, but they are a conceptual art project about the way in which people don't listen, don't think.
• I read somewhere that children have an innate flexibility which diminishes as they grow. Slowly, slowly, adulthood deadens us. Muscles are forgotten, slacken, waste. And one day we realise we can no longer hoist ourselves parallel with the ground to fly from flagpoles. Unless we are acrobats, or digitally generated.
• A man is talking about how he is saving to purchase his own grave. He confesses he is not terribly old, dying, or sick. ... All the same, he is saving to buy his own grave and he talks about this as if it's perfectly reasonable. As if death ought to be life's foremost occupation. What a waste of water and light and oxygen this man is, I think. What a tragedy that so many others who are trying so frantically to continue to live, will die, while he's still saving.
• I tried to think of a vice I want to sacrifice, and ended up reasoning that I need my bad habits, desperately, just to coax myself through each day. ... I need my mother to believe I still feel like doing the things I used to. I don't want her to know about how it has become necessary to coax myself.
• What is it about crying? As if my body believes that squeezing all its salt out might somehow quell the sadness. As if sadness is a parasite which suckles on sodium chloride.
• I stay up late and watch a foreign film on the Irish language channel. It is spoken in Hungarian, subtitled in Irish. I can't understand either, but I still have all the little gestures and noises and faces people make in order to express themselves; I still understand the film, enough. How prosaic words are, I realise, how insufficient.
  • a line made by walking, sara baume

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• It was easier to speak a language he knew, even if he was talking to a dead woman.
• He never had the heart to tell his parents that he was scared of heights, that even his own altitude was almost more than he could bear -- that the best part of climbing, the only part that made him continue, was the feeling of their arms around him when he landed back on the ground. For that, he would go as high as they wanted him to.
• And yet he needed them -- the food, the conversation, the feeling of communion they brought into his day. They were like perfume slipped behind the ear of a beautiful woman, or wine with dinner-- nothing you had to have to live, and yet nothing felt more like life than the experience of them.
  • the lost art of mixing, erica bauermeister

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• You are the treasure of my life, Loveday, the best thing I ever did, and knowing that I'd destroyed all of the things I'd worked so hard to give you -- the confidence, the security, the sense of being loved -- is what broke me every single day that we've been apart.
  • the lost for words bookshop, stephanie butland

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• As the old German saying goes, the music of Bach gave us God's word, Beethoven's gave us God's fire, but Mozart's gave God's laughter to the world. He found the accidents in song that reminded music to glorify the playful, the mischievous, the pop! that sends Jack exploding from the box after so much measured cranking.
• For so much is left unanswered when a man falls from heaven and writes Don Giovanni. Or when the wingbeats of countless tiny creatures lift upward and sound like thunder as they block out the sun. When five hundred starlings drop from the sky into shallow ponds without making a sound. When a genius buys a songbird because, despite his noisy life, something is missing.
• Lungs seem the trickiest parts to clone from a mammal; they're what killed Dolly the sheep as well. How fitting that the most difficult nature to re-create in a lab is the breath of life.
  • animals strike curious poses, elena passarello

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• You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty.
• the very impossibility of your reading this is all that makes my telling it possible.
• Let me tie my shadow to your feet and call it friendship, I said to myself.
  • on earth we're briefly gorgeous, ocean vuong

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• No, not me; I'm queer. I'm queer for my self, for my self hood, queer for this queer self I find myself to be, queer with strange appetites, and a heart that throbs most queerly. I'm queer for other queers, queer for their shapes and colors and sizes, queer for their tastes. I'm queer for the ruthless sea. I'm queer for all the little queer creatures in the tide pools. I'm queer for the light when it breaks the horizon and queer for it when it sinks behind the trees. I'm plain queer for these people and queer for this world. I'm downright queer in love with this wreck of a world, queer in love with love itself --love's always queer, always arriving in our hearts from queer nowheres, queering everything-- and there we are; wide awake all night, queer as queer can be; queer orphans, queer widows, queer boys, and queer girls; sorrel girls queer for ivory boys, daffodil boys queer for lilac girls; carmine girls queer for sable girls, cinnamon boys so very queer for boys of bluest milk. / Wicked shepherds! Burn me at the stake and hang me from a tree. Clap me in the stocks; send me down the mine; set me in the burning fields. But I am queer. And I say, Here is water, bread, a dull penny. Here're my old shirt, my plane and hammer, a roof I'll help you raise above your head. Here is my queer old body, in a barn, behind a hedge, beneath a shadow, on a bare pallet --quick-- while the murderous king still sleeps. Here is a song, a painting, a jig and a reel. Here is an island for an apple, an orchard for an eye. Here is a single, perfect apple for an island.
  • this other eden, paul harding