Bluets

by Maggie Nelson

the currents were too unusual. So I stayed behind, and became known as the lady who waits, the sad sack of town with hair that smells like an animal.

I can think of many occasions on which a blue has made me feel suddenly hopeful (turning one’s car around a sharp curve on a precipice and abruptly finding ocean; flipping on the light in a stranger’s bathroom one presumed to be white but which was, in fact, robin-egg blue; coming across a collection of navy blue bottle tops pressed into cement on the Williamsburg Bridge, or a shining mountain of broken blue glass outside a glass factory in Mexico),

“false consciousness should be a cause for celebration.”

There is a color inside of the fucking, but it is not blue.

Triduana was slightly more inventive, and tore hers out with a thorn, then sent them to her suitor on a skewer.

is easier, of course, to find dignity in one’s solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem.

But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink—Here you are again, it says, and so am

Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.

If you’re lonely, there’s a guy on Craigslist two blocks away who says he has an hour to kill and a dick longer than a donkey’s. He has posted a photograph to prove it.

What I know: when I met you, a blue rush began. I want you to know, I no longer hold you responsible.