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You’re not meant to call women ‘birds’ nowadays, are you? I always liked it. Sums women up – not in a bad way, don’t get me wrong. Birds … always out of reach. Aren’t they? You think she’s on your arm and then she’s flown. And they seem to like worms.
wish TO KNOW why all that ails mankind must be the fault of womankind? Women are weak, said Byron. Or perhaps men need to believe it is so, I said.
I want to hold this moment. I want to believe it. I want his love to have enough salt in it to float me. I don’t want to be swimming for my life. I want to trust him. I don’t trust him.
Humans: so many good ideas. So many failed ideals.
If we cannot keep this love, there is a place in me that has been changed by this love. And I will honour it. Think of it as a private place of worship, if you like. And sometimes, boarding a plane, or waking up, or walking down the street, or taking a shower (he pauses at the memory), I will recall that place and never regret the time I spent there.
There is a view that love, because it begins so spontaneously, is also simple. Yet if love engages our whole being and affects our whole world, how can it be simple? The days of simple are done – if they ever existed. Love is not a pristine planet before contaminants and pollutants, before the arrival of Man. Love is a disturbance among the disturbed.
Only in the living of it does life seem ordinary. In the telling of it we find ourselves strangers among the strange.
Yet you wish to die! I said. I wish to disappear! I do not belong in this body. This gross body!
Women blame each other all the time. It is a trick men play on us.
discover that grief means living with someone who is no longer there.
