Words in Deep Blue

by Cath Crowley

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us. —KAFKA

then she starts italicizing love into all its depressing definitions. “I just don’t think I’m in love with you. I tried, though. I tried really hard.”

I quite like freaks.

It was a strange night. I look back and the thing I remember about it is the sky. I hadn’t seen one like it before. Flat and starless, as though the world had become a box with a lid on it.

Humans are a highly ordered system, and once we’re disordered beyond repair, we don’t reorder.

“But I like to think of love as being slightly more forgiving than time.”

Shitness, my sister says, has a momentum that good luck just doesn’t have.

I order another beer and another because the blur under my skin feels more than good. It feels great.

unrequited love is just as shit in the morning as it is at night. Possibly more shit because you have a whole day ahead of you.”

All the sadness of losing him is sealed in and no one else’s sadness seems to get through.

The memories are in the words. And from that the strange thought comes that my memories are trapped in all the copies of this poem, and so everyone who’s reading it, no matter what copy, has my memories without knowing it.

I could imagine a scientist and a poet collecting specimens, drawing them, observing them from two different poles of life. I imagined one sparking the thoughts of the other.

The traces of them are hidden, small lines in books. In a library from which no one can borrow.

I’m not fucking off. I’m your friend. Friends don’t fuck off. And by the way, friends don’t tell each other to fuck off, either.

Death is something we shy away from, except in literature or television, when we tend to stare right at it.”

I hate the thought that you might forget and remember, forget and remember. I think that must be exhausting.

You have my phone number, any time you require me to carry you home in a storm.

Doesn’t love fall somewhere in the big scheme of things? Isn’t it the biggest scheme?

Death is the biggest in the big scheme of things.

Life is the big scheme; death is the little one at the end.

Love’s insane. But surely it’s not fucking insane.

He stretches out his arm so I can lie on it, and it makes the thought of not existing slightly less terrifying.

I wonder if the future sends us hints to get us ready, so that the grief doesn’t kill us when it comes.

I think that we look back and read the past with the present in our eyes.

Words do matter and they do start revolutions, but you can’t eat a revolution. You can’t pay the rent with a revolution.

We’re looking for an ordinary copy, which is anything but ordinary.

But he doesn’t understand that memory is abstract and chaotic. Memory isn’t straightforward. It surfaces in sounds and images and feelings. He doesn’t realize that in getting another person’s memory, he will lose parts of himself.

A death should change us forever. No two deaths should be the same.

“You shouldn’t feel guilty about that,” he says, and I wonder if that’s what I’ve been waiting to hear. That I’m allowed to love it again.

the transmigration of memory that happens all the time—saving people the only way we can—holding the dead here with their stories, with their marks on the page, with their histories. It’s a very beautiful idea, and, I decide, entirely possible.

We lose things, but sometimes they come back. Life doesn’t always happen in the order you want.

We are the books we read and the things we love. Cal is the ocean and the letters he left. Our ghosts hide in the things we leave behind.

A world without time is a terrible thing. There is no certainty. Days could move quickly or slowly, or not at all. The laws of the universe have been tinkered with, and you are blindly wheeling. There is no grip in a world like this.

The past is with me; the future is unmapped and changeable.