Bluets

by Maggie Nelson

And so I fell in love with a color—in this case, the color blue—as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns.

Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning.

But I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live.

Above all, I want to stop missing you.

The blue was beating.

If a color could deliver hope, does it follow that it could also bring despair?

Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance? Or is the love itself the disturbance? And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?

She is trying to get me to see that although I thought I loved this man very completely for exactly who he was, I was in fact blind to the man he actually was, or is.

“Love is something so ugly that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they were doing” (Leonardo da Vinci).

I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do.

But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink—Here you are again, it says, and so am I.

Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.

Standing in front of these blue paintings, or propositions, at the Tate, feeling their blue radiate out so hotly that it seemed to be touching, perhaps even hurting, my eyeballs, I wrote but one phrase in my notebook: too much.

What I know: when I met you, a blue rush began. I want you to know, I no longer hold you responsible.

This is the deepest blue, talking, talking, always talking to you.

“The sadness will last forever.” I imagine he was right.

But really this is very strange—as if blue not only had a heart, but also a mind.

Eventually you will have to give up this love, she told me one night while I made us dinner. It has a morbid heart.

How can I tell her that not trying has become the whole point, the whole plan?

If you are in love with red then you slit or shoot. If you are in love with blue you fill your pouch with stones good for sucking and head down to the river. Any river will do.

“Life is usually stronger than people’s love for it”

To hear it is to understand why suicide is both so easy and so difficult: to commit it one has to stamp out this native triumphance, either by training oneself, over time, to dehabilitate or disbelieve it (drugs help here), or by force of ambush.

the story of indigo is, at least in part, the story of slavery, riots, and misery.

Now I like to remember the question alone, as it reminds me that my mind is essentially a sieve, that I am mortal.

190. What’s past is past. One could leave it as it is, too.

I will admit, however, upon considering the matter further, that writing does do something to one’s memory —that at times it can have the effect of an album of childhood photographs, in which each image replaces the memory it aimed to preserve.

For to wish to forget how much you loved someone— and then, to actually forget—can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart.

“No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

Perhaps writing is not really pharmakon, but more of a mordant—a means of binding color to its object—or of feeding it into it, like a tattoo needle drumming ink into skin.

Did I have this double meaning in mind when I told you, a little over a year ago, after it became clear that I would lose you, or that I had already lost you, that you were “etched into my heart” ?

For some, the emptiness itself is God; for others, the space must stay empty.

“As a rule we find pleasure much less pleasurable, pain much more painful than we expected.”

She is too busy asking, in this changed form, what makes a livable life, and how she can live it.

I have seen the bright pith of her soul. I cannot tell you what it looks like, exactly, but I can say that I have seen it.

I thought I had collected enough blue to build a mountain, albeit one of detritus. But it seems to me now as if I have stumbled upon a pile of thin blue gels scattered on the stage long after the show has come and gone;

232. Perhaps, in time, I will also stop missing you.

You have to stand there in the dirty rut you dug, alone in the darkness, in all its pulsing quiet, surrounded by the scandal of corpses.

237. In any case, I am no longer counting the days.

I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.