Kindle Notes & Highlights
I don’t know then that one day I won’t be seventeen. I don’t know that youth doesn’t last, that it’s only a moment, and then it disappears and by the time you finally realize it, it’s too late. It’s finished, vanished, lost.
I am stupidly sentimental: that hasn’t changed much.
I’m in this state of one-way desire. I feel this desire swarming in my belly and running up my spine. But I have to constantly contain and compress it so that it doesn’t betray me in front of others. Because I’ve already understood that desire is visible.
This feeling of love, it transports me, it makes me happy. At the same time, it consumes me and makes me miserable, the way all impossible loves are miserable.
I think I love him for this loneliness, that it’s what pushed me toward him. I love his aloofness, his disengagement with the outside world. Such singularity moves me.
later years, I will often write about the unthinkable, the element of unpredictability that determines outcomes. And game-changing encounters, the unexpected juxtapositions that can shift the course of a life.
Nothing touches me more than cracks in the armor and the person who reveals them.
He imagines an ascension, some kind of epiphany. He believes me to have a brilliant destiny, convinced that within our little community nearly forgotten by the gods, there are only a few chosen and that I’m among them.
will have to learn how to survive them, and perhaps writing is a good means of survival. A way of not forgetting the ones who have disappeared,
But absence is, first and foremost, silence. A vast, enveloping silence that weighs you down and puts you in a state where any unforeseeable, unidentifiable sound can make you jump.
what he offers is a mix of reserve and unspoken pride for his son. I know what that’s like, to be the son of a man like that. I wonder if it’s cold fathers who make the sensitive sons.
I had the time to think all the way home about how affairs of the body are so much more preferable to affairs of the heart, but that sometimes you don’t have the choice.
You can never really let go of your childhood. Especially when it was happy.
Desire does not go out like a match, it extinguishes slowly as it burns into ash. In the end I gave up on all possibility of a reunion.)
And I feel a profound loneliness, the kind you feel when you are alone in the beating heart of a crowd.
There were circumstances—a series of coincidences and simultaneous desire. There was something in the atmosphere, something in the time and the place, that brought us together. And then everything broke—like a firework exploding on a dark night in July that spirals out in all directions, blazing brightly, dying before it touches the ground, so that no one gets burned. No one gets hurt.
I am convinced he never considered changing his mind, that his determination never faltered, that no regret, if there even was any, weakened his will.)
His only certainty will be sorrow.
No matter how much you want to respect someone’s freedom (even when you consider it selfish), you still have your own pain, anger, and melancholy to contend with.
