The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

wild and alive and beautiful as a storm crashing against ev...

This love has no endpoint, she wished to say. See how we’re borne within it, on and on and on?

She lost his face, then. His body was flush with hers; he gripped her hard in his arms and his face burrowed into the cloud of her hair on the pillow. A hopeful confusion, his breath fast in her ear. A wince of pleasure.

“That the distances between things were vast, vaster than I had known when I had sight. Everywhere I felt a void. Everywhere was hollow, God’s presence withdrawn. I walked with fingers outstretched and felt the brokenness of God’s world.

“I have worked to restore some of God’s presence to the hollowness. For repairing the world through His words is the work for which God has intended us.”

Why must man struggle to live, when he inevitably dies?

Why is it a sin against God to wish for death—yet a virtue to choose to die in defense of God’s word? Is life a token, valued only for the thing it’s sacrificed for?

Every living soul came into the world in infancy with wet bright eyes, blinking at motes. Every soul exited this same way. It was the damage that they wrought in between that she regretted.

The mind was only an apparatus within the mechanism of the body—and it took little more than a fever to jostle a cog, so that the gear of thought could no longer turn.

How fearsome a thing was love. She’d wasted her life fleeing it.

Her quaking hands, resting lightly on the tabletop, were the tenderest of sculptures, things of almost unendurable beauty. And he knew that he would never be able to tell her that he loved her as a foundering ship loves a lighthouse, even though the lighthouse is powerless to save it.

A sense of imminence took her.

For is not life solitary, and every thinker lonely?

fueled by this eternal hope: the mirrored image of my thoughts etched, if only for a moment, into another’s.

still I steal hours to read and think upon them in my solitude.

It is not for me to determine which of the seeds I scatter will blossom, nor have I the vanity to think I ought leave greater mark upon the world that has so marked me.

The world too much hates a freed thought or heart.

Let the pages burn, for such be the fate of the soul, that all our striving be dust, and none in the bright living world ever know truly wha...

And let me dispense with my foolish dream of leaving the tracery of my thought whole, perhaps to be read in an age in which there is greater kindness. It...

His mind was a lit corridor, each step before him clear.

This, she saw, was the reason. Water forcing her palm open, the current kissing her fingers. This. This shock of pleasure.