The Heart in Winter

by Kevin Barry

There are folks who get certain intimations about what they need to do in their lives. They can feel these intimations like stirrins of the blood but they can’t always make sense of them. They just get drawn to acting out in certain crazy ways and boy it’s mysterious he said. Feels like they’re acting out under the instruction of the moon and tides. It feels like there ain’t no plan nor design to it but there surely is you just got to learn how to read it right. But whatever intimation you get about your life you got to follow it through and follow it through and follow it through because elsewise nothins gonna make sense ever again.

The haunted music of the place pierced the high country air. She fit just right between the crook of his shoulder and the line of his neck. He was in a state of nice agitation where his mind would not stop in its giddy turning and she was excited by the turns that it took. She called them out ahead of the moment. It was like conducting a tuppenny orchestra. She just ran with the flow of it. She raked him with her nails to his chest. She raked him pretty good. In the bed generally they lost what little of restraint they’d ever known and were like wild animals at it. She got fuck knots in her hair. They ate when they were hungry and slept when tired. The days unfolded and the nights and into the kind of peace that neither had ever known before and it was as if it could have gone on forever.

there was a lot of sadness in the world no matter what way you looked at it.

He said that in his actions he had been guided not by lustfulness nor by greed. He had been steered by fate, he said. He believed he was acting as though under the pull of the moon and tides. He had about as little say in it as that. He needed to be with this person and now that she had been taken from him he needed to follow and find her. If death came in the way of seeing her again in this life, that was just how it was meant to be, and he was not afraid. For the first time in his life, he said, he was not afraid.

In this country? the boy said. They’ll tell you that you can be happy. That it’s your right and destiny. Det här är hästskit. Now that’s a bunch of horseshit. Lycka är inte det vanliga mänskliga uppnåendet. Happiness ain’t generally how it works out for folks. Kom ihåg att vi bara fördriver tid till vår oundvikliga död. Remember always that we’re only markin time until sweet death comes, and it’s surely comin for us all. God be good to us, Tom Rourke said. Om det finns någon där ute som kan hjälpa dig att lindra smärtan i din existens… So if there’s someone out there who can help you to ease the pain of your life… …så ska du göra vad du än behöver göra för att vara med henne. …then he reckon you gotta go an’ do what it is you gotta do.

Love’s hard insistences are known even to the deathlorn, and perhaps especially so, with death being no more than the initiation of grief, and grief being no more than the mark of love’s inevitable loss.

he had offered himself at last to the world of fate and it had not killed him off yet and he had hope even yet.

He had found his style at last. He had found the pitch of authority. He settled into it. He had nothing left to lose.

Anyhow the past it shifts around all the time. The past is not fixed and it is not certain and this much she has learned if nothin else. The past it changes all the while every minute you’re still breathing and how in fuck are you supposed to make sense of it all.