grief

The human mind can only conceive of so much tragedy at once—and when lost lives spiral into the hundreds, then thousands, and then millions, when murder becomes a wide, seemingly unending mass, we lose our ability to see its victims as anything more than an abstract, almost theoretical, collection of lives.

What can life be made to accommodate, what can one life hold inside itself without breaking.

“It means talking about the difference between then and now, and that’s often a sad thing. And immigrants are always a bit sad right from the start anyways. Nobody warns you when you leave town what’s about to happen to your brains. And then some immigrants are sadder than others. And there’s all kinds of reasons why, but the big one is that you ca

I might think I can’t take it anymore, that I can’t go on anymore, but one way or another I get past that.”

In a place like this, your mind expands as the dark end of your imagination blooms, and you wonder if human depravity has any bottom at all, and if it does not, what hope is there for any of us?

Under what conditions is life endurable?

The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop right out from under you. And once that happens, you’ve had it: things’ll never be the same. All you can do is go on living alone down there in the darkness.”

After you died I could not hold a funeral, And so my life became a funeral.