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He biked home in the Florida dark, pumping his legs as fast as he could as if to outpace his sadness, but the sadness was always swifter, easily overtook him again.
He’d woken with a dry tongue and the urge to make the abstract concrete, to build his new understanding: that this was the way that time was, a spiral.
It’s not true that he had no standards, it’s simply that he saw the stun in every woman.
Ophelia was played naked, her tremendous boobs blue-veined like Stilton cheeses.
Life isn’t worth living unless you are young and surrounded by other young people in a beautiful cold garden perfumed by dirt and flowers and fallen leaves, gleaming in the string of lights, listening to the quiet city on the last fine night of the year.
For so long, he had thought it was just a switch he could flick. But he had lost it, his mojo, his juju, his radiance.
Oneiroi are the sons of Nyx. Night. They’re dreams. Brothers of Hypnos, Thanatos, Geras: Sleep, Death, Old Age.
“I fight my music until we’re both too exhausted to feel much of anything.”
He owned few things: ten white button-down shirts, three pairs of jeans, socks, underwear, pair of boots, pair of moccasins, a jacket, musical instruments, and that was about it. Stuff had never interested him, beyond the music he could make from it.
It gnawed at him, the old discomfort of being left with only himself.
If you give voice to the things you think every day about your spouse, you’d crush them to paste.
THE DAY DAWNED FIRST ON THE CLOUDS.
He had read once that sleep does to the cerebellum what waves do to the ocean. Sleep sparks a series of pulses across the webs of neurons, pulses like waves; it washes out what is unnecessary and leaves only what’s important behind.
He’d always loved the ocean’s scent of fresh sex.
Who wouldn’t envy such youth, who wouldn’t grieve what has been lost, in watching.
It was as if the tide of him had been ebbing from her, but she knew, like a real tide, time would bring him back.
It comes over us that we shall never again hear the laughter of our friend, that this garden is forever locked against us. And at that moment begins our true grief.
She hoped he’d seen her own younger face coming near his.
“Grief,” they all said knowingly, feeling profound.
Something whirred in her chest uncomfortably, which she had come to recognize in the past months as a strange chimera of rage and lust. Well! Only one way to exorcise it!
She’d survived on wine and sugar for months because, fuck it, she never really got a childhood, and what was grief but an extended tantrum to be salved by sex and candy?
