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Imagine me then at unlucky thirteen as I entered the eighth grade. Five feet ten inches tall, weighing one hundred and thirty-one pounds. Black hair hanging like drapes on either side of my nose. People knocking on the air in front of my face and calling out, “Anybody in there?” I was in there all right. Where else could I go?
It was like autumn, looking at her. It was like driving up north to see the colors.
I never know what I feel until it’s too late.
Jerome was sliding and climbing on top of me and it felt like it had the night before, like a crushing weight. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.
But in the end it wasn’t up to me. The big things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we’re born.
I hadn’t gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father.
Their hearts were wrung with anguish, the anguish of having children, a vulnerability as astonishing as the capacity for love that parenthood brings, in a cuff link set all its own .
There was so much love in Milton’s eyes that it was impossible to look for truth.
But I was beginning to understand something about normality. Normality wasn’t normal. It couldn’t be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself.
Women know what it means to have a body. They understand its difficulties and frailties, its glories and pleasures. Men think their bodies are theirs alone.
She was my mother, she had given birth to me, she was closer to me than I was to myself.
Nature brought no relief. Outside had ended. There was nowhere to go that wouldn’t be me.
free will is making a comeback. Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.
Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair cut, and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered.
Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else.
Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It’s the thing that lets us say goodbye.