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Can only other people tell you what your body is, or is there a way that you can know something truer about it from the inside, something that cannot be seen or explained?
angry about being an audience to all that tiny pain.
What a terror a body must live through.
Isn’t it just so ugly, isn’t it though? Skin—isn’t it just terrible? It doesn’t give you a minute of rest, does it? Not a single minute!
That’s what people do. We can’t live each other’s lives, and we can’t see each other’s memories or feelings, so we try to find ways to share them with each other. What is next to this memory for you? What are the other memories or feelings that sit close to it?
Life is suffering—
there is a place here for you.
I shut my eyes and imagined a life in which only our thoughts and intentions could be seen, where our bodies were not flesh but something else, something that was more than all this skin, this weight.
Did everyone feel this vacillating, animal loneliness after removing clothes? How could I still be in this thing, answering to its endless needs and betrayals?
Why did living feel so invisibly brief and unbearably long at once?
How lucky we are to have the moon.
Too much light will blind you and too much water will drown you. It is a danger to accept anything real from another person, to know something of them. A person has to be careful about the voices they listen to, the faces they let themselves see.
It takes something, you know, it takes something from you to take care of another person and there’s only so much a person has to give.
How much harm did we cause without knowing it? How much harm did we cause when we were certain we were doing such good?
It was everywhere, all at once, like sunlight.
Her face needed to be washed with tears, warm water from the body, the body’s way of saying, Yes, I am still in here.