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I can’t tell you how it felt. How it still feels. I can’t. Words feel cheap and ring hollow and turn everything I say, everything I feel, into a tawdry romance novel full of flowery phrases designed to illicit sympathetic tears and an immediate response. A response that has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with easy emotion that you can set aside when you close the cover. Emotion that has you wiping your eyes and chirping a happy hiccup, appreciating the fact that it was all just a story.
People love babies, even sick babies. Even crack babies. But babies grow up to be kids. Nobody really wants messed up kids.
He didn’t talk to me, which I convinced myself was his only redeeming quality.
I didn’t let myself think about my infatuation, because then I would have to acknowledge it.
Her laugh was throaty and soft, and it made my heart swell like a balloon in my chest, fuller and fuller until I had to sneak breaths around its increased size.
People liked religion but they didn’t want to have to exercise any faith. Religion was comforting with all its structure and its rules. It made people feel safe. But faith wasn’t safe. Faith was hard and uncomfortable and forced people to step out on a limb.
“Forgiveness is usually easier than permission.”
Kids made it hard to be cruel.
I was an asshole. But I wasn’t a bully.
I needed his money, and he needed my company, sad as it usually was.
I got to see all the art I’d always dreamed of seeing. I loved filling my head with pictures, pictures that didn’t have anything to do with me or with death. Until one day I realized that life imitates death, especially in artwork. The art of the past is all about death—the artists die and their art remains, a testament to the living and the dead. The realization was a powerful one. I didn’t feel nearly as alone, or nearly as odd. I even wondered at times, gazing at something truly awe-inspiring, if all artists didn’t commune with spirits.
There was solace in that. Miserable solace, but solace.
It was the same kind of October—unseasonably warm, but predictably beautiful.
Her skin was like silk and her sighs like satin, and I couldn’t look away from the pleasure on her face or the pleas in her hands that urged me onward.
“Edgar Allen Poe said many beautiful things—and many disturbing things—but they often go together, you know.”
“Poe said, ‘There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion.’”
I let people talk and let my middle finger answer for me when a response was demanded.
October had always been my favorite month. And then October took Eli. And I hated her. October gave me sunflowers—a peace offering, I suppose. I put them on his grave, and hated her again.
You’re afraid of the truth, Georgia. And people who are afraid of the truth never find it.
But arguing was something I rarely did. I’d learned long ago that people were going to think what they thought, believe whatever they were going to believe, and speaking up wouldn’t change their minds.
her mouth filled my mind with color. Just like it always had. Pink. Her kiss was pink. Soft, sunset pink, streaked with gold. The rosy blush swirled behind my eyes, and I pressed my lips more firmly against hers, releasing her hair and her body to hold her face in my hands, to keep the colors in place, to keep them from fading. And then her lips parted beneath mine and the colors became leaping currents of red and gold, pulsing against my eyes as if the soft sweep of her tongue left fire in its wake.
But Moses’s pictures were like that, glorious and terrible. Glorious because they brought memory to life, terrible for the same reason.
I suddenly found myself smiling. It was the oddest thing. It was the oddest and most wonderful, horrible thing. I was smiling and my eyes were filling with tears. I turned away, needing a moment to decide whether or not I was going to accept a new truth.
as I pondered the fact that maybe none of us are safe. Not truly. Not even from the people we love. Not even from the people who love us.
She had focused in on me that summer, as if I was everything she had ever wanted. And that singular intensity had been my undoing.
But she wasn’t the only one who was suffering, and sometimes there is comfort in the knowledge that you don’t suffer alone, sad as that is.
“I cry every day. Do you know that? I cry every damn day. I never used to cry. Now, not a day goes by that I don’t find myself in tears. Sometimes I hide in the closet so I can pretend it isn’t happening again. One day, I’m going to have a day when I don’t cry, and part of me thinks that will be the worst day of all. Because he will truly be slipping away.”
He saw himself in the story, the way we all see ourselves in the characters we love.
I wondered if the way I was feeling was simply a byproduct of love. Now that I had it, now that I acknowledged I needed it, I was terrified of losing it.
