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“I like it,” he said. “What?” He loosened the wine from his lips. “Your brain.”
The thing about women and clothes was, in Regan’s mind, that nothing was ever a permanent expression; it wasn’t any sort of commitment to being this type of girl or that one, but purely today, I am.
That I could study you for a lifetime, carrying all of your peculiarities and discretions in the webs of my spidery palms, and still feel empty-handed.
He’d once asked his father what it had felt like to meet his mother. “Like jumping off a cliff,” Masso had said, and not in a way that invited further questioning.
I am more addicted to the thought of your name on my tongue than I am to any other form of vice. The thought of having you is more dangerous than any cocktail of drugs, the idea of belonging to you endlessly destructive.
His name is written on my skin, he scarred me, I’ve changed my entire shape for having fit within the enormity of his thoughts, and now the only words I know are lines and color.
She couldn’t prevent the urge to know his thoughts. She wanted to lace them between her fingers, to root them in her hands, to twine them around her limbs until he’d secured her within the invisible web of his carefully ordered madness.
Do you understand, do you know what you hold in your hands, do you know how readily it breaks?
Are you ready? his green eyes had asked, Because if I let you in, I will not let you go.
Nothing important, just letting you know I won’t be there when you get home, thank you for the shape you took in my life but it’s over now, it doesn’t fit.
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.
She says very seriously, You, always you, I can’t help it.
Jesus, he thinks, something is wrong with us, we are unwell, no one has ever felt any of this without destruction.
Love was a withering Yes, dear, and the sensation of Don’t fight, Be careful of the eggshells, You are not at home here and can easily be sent away. She had thought love meant being Reasonable, a proper noun for a proper effort, for the evasive toil of Love and Relationships, and it made her think, from time to time, of her briefest love story.
Can you love my brain even when it is small? When it is malevolent? When it’s violent? Can you love it when it doesn’t love me?
She has already lost herself many times, many ways, so she wants to do it again and thinks it will be familiar.
I think: Everyone else is right about me. I am the common factor, aren’t I? So that must mean everyone else is right.
Okay fine, she doesn’t really know why exactly, but she thinks part of it was about taking hold of a sinking ship and steering it somewhere, anywhere. Even the prospect of a crash was better than floating aimlessly.
She was just being needlessly metaphorical, it’s a habit of hers.
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.
She doesn’t like what they do to her, how lost they make her feel. 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.
The Truth. She seemed to find it only by digging in with an obscene fascination, a close-to-perversity ravaging, no matter the subject.
Regan was always thinking but she called it feeling, and whatever it was, it was rapid and difficult to follow.
But I remember what it was to feel everything all at once, and I have to tell you,” Masso said urgently, “I never pieced myself back together.
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.
He’d push her away, merciless, and even that she would relish, perversely. He’d push and he’d flee and she, like a half-starved junkie, would only crave him all the more.
Aldo, I cry when it rains, I pick fights sometimes, I don’t know why. I look at the sky and feel this inexplicable sense of dread. I’m afraid that everything will end; are you ever afraid like that?
“I was thinking about the way the water felt hitting my ankles, the way it could pull me away. I thought about how easy it would be to disappear, to get dragged under the waves and be lost forever, but you were standing right there, and I thought … all I’d have to do is reach out.”
“So when people say we’re alone in the ether…?” “Alone in everything. In time and space, in existence, in religion.”
“You’ve just been carrying it around for so long that you can’t put it down, can you?
She wanted to tell him, to teach him: Every time you love, pieces of you break off and get replaced by something you steal from someone else.
Aldo did not tell Masso that he was gripped with terror, understanding now what it really meant to love something. That to love a person was to forfeit the need to place limits on them, and therefore to love was to exist in a constant, paralyzing threat.
He had never cared to see whether anything really worked, only whether he could solve it, fix it, make it into something possible to understand.
Because you and I, we are so different, aren’t we, and yet we are more like each other than the rest of the world is like us, and for that I bless you, I condemn you, I sanctify you, I sustain you.
They cannot hang it in the Louvre, they will have to put it in the Vatican, because what we are is holy, and this, you and me as one together, is transubstantiation of the highest degree.
And what, he asks, is The Truth? That she will keep turning corners until she finds him.
Look, whatever they are, it’s irreversible. She is this version of herself because of him, and vice versa. There’s no changing that now.
People often ask me how I know the difference between what’s in my head (between whatever chemical imbalance might be lying to me on any given day) and what’s real, but the truth is that I have no choice but to accept that what’s in my head is what’s real. My clients’ pain was my pain. Everyone’s pain was mine, and I lacked the proficiency to carry it.
