Maybe I will always have to love the idea of love or a concept of God more than I can love a person.
~ Catherine Lacey
I sometimes wondered why I even answered the phone, but I guess I always had the hope that it would be someone else, some other way of life calling for me.
Past love is as good as a past dream, intangible, impossible to share.
He excused himself for a nap, and this day blended into his dreams like like years blended into a life, unseen but still felt, the line between memory and present always bleeding.
I couldn't decide how to feel about what he was saying, whether it was all nonsense or just more evidence that I would never understand this world.
Sex seemed like a thing that might only happen to me at random, outside my control, like the weather.
But what had really happened? It was still unclear. Was it possible nothing of any significance had ever happened between us and our ending was just the sad process of realizing this?
It was possible she might not have the right feeling after all, that she wasn't in love, wasn't in limerence, but was in some unnamed place alone.
She was sure no one had ever been more in love than they were in those weeks, consumed by such longing, wanting to just be alive beside each other.
It was grotesque and eerie, too strange of a dream.
I closed my eyes, tried to get as far away from myself as I could.
He would never be that way again. He would never have the power of that specific kind of not-knowing.
I needed nothing and was needed nowhere. I almost doubted I was alive.
Speaking felt impossible, as contained and enclosed as she was, a longing that went on a loop, a longing for nothing at all.
It depressed me to think that I might have been looking at another person but seeing only myself.
She missed his nothing. It had felt like something.
