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As I followed the simple map on the invitation, I was struck by a vague, disconcerting premonition. Something just wasn’t right.
Relatable
It occurred to me that maybe this was a personal message directed at me, and me alone. Someone was going to the trouble of telling me where I’d gone wrong, what it was that I’d overlooked.
It isn’t easy for a young man to judge an elderly person’s age. To me, they all just looked like old people. Sixty, seventy—what was the difference? They weren’t young anymore, that was all.
“A circle with many centers.”
He was older than me, and politeness dictated that I respond.
Right now is a critical time. Because this is the period when your brain and your heart form and solidify.”
Wasn’t the kind of circle the old man was talking about the opposite of a circle?
It was permanently unsolved, like some ancient riddle. What took place that day was incomprehensible, inexplicable, and at eighteen it left me bewildered and mystified. So much so that, for a moment, I nearly lost my way.
“Things like this happen sometimes in our lives,” I told him. “Inexplicable, illogical events that nevertheless are deeply disturbing. I guess we need to not think about them, just close our eyes and get through them. As if we were passing under a huge wave.”
What I couldn’t yet grasp were all the myriad phenomenon that lay in the space between happiness and sadness, how they related to each other.
Almost as if to show that love and death were concepts that could not be separated or divided.
Welp childbirth kinda does that to ya
He calls me whenever he wants my body,” she said. “Like ordering takeout over the phone.”
Sounds about right
back then it was beyond me to imagine what feelings this entailed—for a woman to want a man to make love to her. (And even now, come to think of it, I don’t entirely understand it.)
Lol he sure has a low opinion of his own sex
There were forty-two poems contained in the collection.
several of the tanka she wrote—eight of them, specifically—struck
As I consider that we’ll never meet again I also consider how there’s no reason that we cannot
drawn by the light trampled by shadows
And for some reason these involved a head being severed with a blade.
Each and every moment, our bodies are on a one-way journey to collapse and deterioration, unable to turn back the clock.
