The Details

by Ia Genberg

Some books stay in your bones long after their titles and details have slipped from memory.

None of them could mix the kisses on my lips with anything else. The kisses always landed where they did (on my lips) and never elsewhere in my life or on my attempts to create something.

I couldn’t choose to hold on to or let go of feelings; instead it would be the feelings that finally gave up and released me.

The words for “forgiveness” and “freedom” are the same in several languages; an obvious point perhaps, but in this moment I realized that “letting go” could be said in the same breath.

TV means that somebody else is trying to control my gaze, whereas books leave me to my own devices.

A methodical approach to an irrational task offers a certain hope of success in a project that is in fact hopeless. And to some extent a methodical approach can provide a sense of meaning, even joy in some cases.

I’ve had more than my share of magic in life, most often in the encounter with others.

Our relationship was the length of a breath and yet he stayed with me, as if there was something in me that bent around him, a new paradigm for all my future verbs.

We live so many lives within our lives—smaller lives with people who come and go, friends who disappear, children who grow up—and I never know which of these lives is meant to serve as the frame.

Anxiety’s central task, as instructed by fear, is to run ahead and touch everything, circle potentialities with the intention of preventing them from happening, on and on and on in a process that never stops, that becomes one with life.

She was never granted peace, there was always some aspect of the world that had to be controlled lest things went out of hand. And I suppose that’s what’s at the heart of it for every person suffering from anxiety; the fact that life, by its very nature, is impossible to manage.