More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
August 16, 2024 - September 8, 2025
When I was alive, I imagined something redemptive about the end of the world. I thought it would be a kind of purification. Or at least a simplification. Rectification through reduction. I could picture the empty cities, the reclaimed land. That was the future. This is now. The end of the world looks exactly the way you remember. Don’t try to picture the apocalypse. Everything is the same.
I miss your name. I’m sorry, but I have forgotten it, too. I don’t look for it on the walls. The thought that I might read it and pass it by, just go on to the next name, is terrible. Like meeting you in another life and failing to recognize you.
If I ever remember your name, how will I know it was really your name?
“My meaning may not be clear. That does not matter. Nothing matters. My meaning. Your meaning. Meaning does not matter. Only hunger.”
“We came here from life. A bleak and aimless world of uncertainty and self-delusion, of violence cloaked in compassion, of greed masquerading as order. A world of ranks and classes and races. Life. A world consumed by fear. A terrible world whose only consolations were the fantasies of god and of science. Life. We renounce that world. We renounce life. We turn our backs on its injustices. Its trivialities. Its delusions. We have made a new world! What do we call it, this new world?”
Tabassum liked this
Emptiness spills into me. My ear is the Panama Canal connecting two oceans of emptiness. The emptiness out there and an emptiness in me. Dark. Entire. Impossible. Emptiness teeming with cold silence. It is so silent it is loud. It is unbearable. It is so familiar.
That one thing that only I knew about myself. That thing that made me me, alone in all the universe. I’ve lost it.”
Who can say why every loss and deferred sorrow is consolidated in the door’s incontrovertible latch, but for a minute I am undone. Untethered.
The black hole that is sucking me inside out, the utter unutterableness that I never entered when I was alive.
The black swarm behind my teeth. There is no bottom to this well. No dark place to wait it out. Nothing will ever touch this craving for you.
It lasts forever then it is over. And I am running.
It was the end. But we did not know it then. You do not know the end has happened until later. Or you do not admit it. Looking back, you can see it. And you realize that all the time after that was just an effort to keep going as if it weren’t already over.
Everything in me is sad and everything around me is a part of it. The cracked pavement, the moon, the abandoned cars, the gravity that holds them to the road. It is total. I am taken, or taken down. I drop to my knees. And then the feeling passes. Leaves me. I look for it. In the moon. In me. Nothing but a new sense of the same empty.
It is clear there is no simple beginning or simple ending. Every live thing is the history and future of all dead things. Every dead thing is the future of all live things.
It is pointless to wish I had the hunger back instead of this endless grief.
If they cut me into little parts and bury me in separate holes, will that be that? Will I still think of you? Will my loss be multiplied or divided?
How small or altered or distant must a part of us be before it stops being a part of us? Does it ever?
Fear? Hope? What in me wants to persist if there is no life to extend, no hunger to feed? What in me wants to die?
I would have had so much in having you and would have lost so much in losing you that I would no longer want anything.
I realize now that when I was playing these silent movies of life after our life, you were still there. You were sitting with me, the two of us alone in the theater, still together. This sadness is not an empty church and not an empty house. It is the whole empty world and I am in it and it is in me.