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Consumption, that’s what this is. He is being willingly eaten alive.
He is especially worshipful this Sunday. This particular Sunday, he willingly falls to his knees.
He thinks about time, which has only recently begun, or at least now feels different. He thinks: The Babylonians were wrong; time is made of her.
The first time they argue she is sure that she loves him.
It is enough to have known that the inside of her chest is more than a place for storage.
Isn’t that the success of a rebellion, knowing what people want, so to vehemently deny what others so desperately desire?
Can you love it when it doesn’t love me?
Sometimes I think: No wait I’m lying, all the time I think: Everyone else is right about me. I am the common factor, aren’t I? So that must mean everyone else is right.
Her ship? It’s always sinking, she hates it, it’s either sinking or it’s exploding, either way it never seems to be going anywhere.
Maybe that’s the big secret, that even though she hates her feelings, she’d still rather have them than not. Maybe the enormity of it all is that she hates the highs and the lows and she knows they’re Bad, that they’re Not Supposed To Happen, but she is not herself without them. She misses herself. She doesn’t really know who she is but she wants to know, she wants to find out, and she can’t do it with pills.
he doesn’t want to be the person she hides from, he wants to be the person she hides with.
Could she have loved him if she’d kept up with her pills? No, she couldn’t have, she wouldn’t have let herself, or the pills wouldn’t have let her.
She’s your … you know, your provocateur, she’s your disturbance.
He knows that she hears her mother’s voice in her head and sometimes she loses her own voice inside it; he knows she finds it again when he takes her face in his hands and says: Are you in there?
“I want your future, Aldo. I want it for me.”
Rinaldo Damiani knows how to love me, and I didn’t even think to put it on the list.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m just waiting for something that will never happen,” he said. “Like I’m just existing from day to day but will never really matter. I get up in the morning because I have to, because I have to do something or I’m just wasting space, or because if I don’t answer the phone my dad will be alone. But it’s an effort, it takes work. I have to tell myself, every day, get up. Get up, do this, move like this, talk to people, be normal, try to be social, be nice, be patient.
“We don’t even understand time, so how are we possibly supposed to understand health, which is a concept we made up? I don’t just feel differently about you—I feel more, a lot more. It’s like you woke up something inside me and it won’t be quiet. It refuses to calm down, and why should it? It’s not like ‘Oh, you make me happy,’ it’s not something as clichéd as that. You make me feel like I’m alive for a fucking reason. Like for once I’m not just a goddamn waste of time.”
This feeling, this flutter in my chest and this lightness in my bones and this flicker in my blood, this must be happiness. This must be what it feels like to be happy.
If this is what it is to burn, he thought, then I will be worth more as scattered ash than any of my unscathed pieces.
The idea that even he didn’t recognize happiness when he felt it was comforting, in some way. She was comforted by knowing he was equally as stupid and hopeless as she was.
Stay, stay, stay.
“Aldo,” Regan said, “what’s the ether?” “It’s what people used to believe the universe was filled with,” he said.
“ether was what they called the air in the realm of the gods. A shining, fluid substance.” “So when people say we’re alone in the ether…?” “Alone in everything. In time and space, in existence, in religion.”
Habits, Aldo had always thought, were the antithesis of linear time. As in, a habitual existence was to live time in circles, like chasing your tail, this time the same as this time the same as that one.
He could look back on himself, time-traveling through retrospect, and see that he was in love with her right away, though he’d given it other names at the time: curiosity, interest, attraction.
She proved herself alive by proving this day had never been lived before, that this thing had never been felt or never tasted or never wanted, and now, because it existed, things were different; changed.
Maybe you weren’t made this way, you became this way,” she finished triumphantly, and then he understood. I’m made like this, he had told her before, and so now she was setting him free, casting off the restrictions of a dull reality. She made his life magic as a favor to him, without his asking, and he understood now, too, what she’d meant: I don’t believe it, but maybe I do. It isn’t real, but maybe it is.
It cannot suffer a loss and become what it was before, no, it doesn’t work that way. If she comes back, Aldo told his father, she will be different.
She cannot be, even in resurrection, what she was in life.
So this is what it is to love something you cannot control, he thought. It felt precisely like terror.
Can you really understand someone without knowing what brings them pleasure? No, you really can’t, so we have to resign ourselves to knowing that we won’t know most of the people in our lives at all.” Then she added, conspiratorially, “But that doesn’t mean I can’t make guesses.”
Maybe this is why men rule the world, because they were clever enough to convince women that virginity is precious, that sex itself should be secret, that being penetrated was sacrosanct. It’s idiotic, it’s even dumber than it is cruel and that’s the worst part. The idea that I should want sex less than you, why does that exist?”
Regan did not enjoy honesty. She hated it, was repulsed by it, and by her own truths especially.
“Because I love you.” As simple and uncomplicated and wildly unimaginable as that.
I am Atlas, he thought, holding up the heavens. I will be endurance, I will have to endure.
Every time you love, pieces of you break off and get replaced by something you steal from someone else. It seems like it’s the right shape but it’s slightly different every time, so that eventually, very very quietly and over days and days and days, you are transformed into something unrecognizable, and it happens so slowly you don’t even notice, like shedding scales and making new ones.
He woke me up, she wanted to scream; he woke me,
To give into something all at once was to lose yourself completely, and therefore to resist was to exchange one fleeting moment of pleasure for a more exquisite, abounding pain.
It was infatuating, learning to read her, only she’s not just a problem without a solution, she’s a broken loop that can’t be fixed.
Had Regan gotten out of bed willingly or sluggishly? Had she leapt or dragged? Had she purchased something, many things, and had she been gone for several hours, or had she never left the house? Was Regan smiling, was she crying, was she shouting? Regan’s tears were almost never of sadness and, instead, usually of rage or frustration, little of which was directed at him.
But the problem with pain existing in the mind is that it is easy to trick the mind into almost anything
Cravings were wishes that could be satisfied, but compulsions were needs that must be met.
They could have only fought in blue, in melancholy tones of it, because relationships, for them, were blue.
“I feel like I’ve been going in circles for most of my life, just repeating the same patterns. This is the first time it feels different, and it’s not like I’m afraid, exactly, it’s just that I don’t know how it will feel. I’ve never done it before,” she admitted, “and it’s scary, I guess, but I’m not afraid.”
The rejection she’d felt from his disinterest was an old one, more hers than his, with her mother’s voice fresh in her head: You see, Charlotte? Nobody wants you, nobody has ever wanted you, you’re irresponsible with the love of others and so they lose interest in you, they always will.
the possibility that she could haunt him or free him, and that whatever she did or did not do was entirely up to her. The immensity of it was crippling.
Give it time, she told herself. Let it breathe, take the space to find the outlines. An ending is only an ending, she thought, when both parties agree they’ve reached the end.
“Art isn’t about explaining shit,” she said, coughing once. “It’s about sharing things—experiences, feelings. Art is something we do to feel human, not because we are.”
we have agreed, collectively, that to proceed without knowledge or understanding is a stupid kind of bravery, an impulsive kind of blindness, but that to be alone without wonder or curiosity is to chip away any possible value we might discover in existing.”
