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I wanted to die. Conveniently, I now lived next door to a funeral parlor.
Interactions with strangers always spiked my blood pressure.
“Last time you left claw marks on the seat, like a nervous cat. I can’t afford to reupholster the front bench again.”
Clearly, he was a gentleman. And given my thoughts, I was no lady.
I forced myself not to steal a glimpse of said ass in pajamas. Grand—now I was objectifying her.
“The way you make the world more colorful. I don’t think I realized how much I needed it until we met.
“You know how people look at you when they find out you’re a widow? The pity? I can’t stand it. The way they feel guilty and apologize if they mention their own spouse in conversation, that kind of thing.”
“Everything changes in this world. Not always for the worse. Wounds heal, if you let them.”
My body was making up for lost time, the libido I lacked for years rushing in like a flash flood and threatening the annihilation of our friendship.
I’d never get her out of my system, but I’d take what she was willing to offer.
“We show the people we love the ugliest parts of ourselves, and we tell them the truth even when it hurts, because that’s what intimacy is.”
Social withdrawal had never stopped him from being empathetic, deep in his heart and in all his actions.
Grief is as nonlinear and convoluted as it is persistent.
“I enjoy making you come. So I pay attention to how to do it.”
I may not be very experienced, but I’m a fast study, and Lark’s pleasure was my favorite subject.
“Mo chuisle? It means ‘my pulse.’ I never quite understood it before, what it meant to have another person be the d-driving force behind the pump of your blood, but it’s true. Lark, your smile saved me like an emergency transfusion. Your laugh is the song my every blood cell dances to. Your touch revived me from darkness. You are my pulse. You make me feel alive even when I’m surrounded by death.”
Love was a living thing. It spread like wild brambles and took over everything.
“You’ve been telling yourself lies for too long, darlin’. It’s time to unlearn them.”
She was the finest work of art I could imagine, more precious than anything in the Book of Kells or the National Gallery.
In an interview, my animation hero Hayao Miyazaki once said that he strived to portray love as a relationship where two people mutually inspire each other to live.
