Sublime

I found out early that you can throw yourself away, missing what you’ve lost.

She had felt the joy of love for that so far from ordinary man—a conductor on the railroad but also a poet, a journalist—and her fragile mind had been unable to readjust to the rough normality of life without him.

I’m not a household name. I won’t go into the tedious specifics of what I do, but picture a woman who had success in several mediums at a young age and has continued very steadily, always circling her central concerns in a sort of ecstatic fugue state with the confidence that comes from knowing there is no other path—her whole life will be this

He remembered: deaths. Jimmy first.

In one house a woman rose from her chair, where she sat reading. She, too, kissed her company, and—at the door—looked back into the cheerful room, with a smile. But once outside, her face was that of a dead woman, as she drew from her bag a bit of crumpled paper, covered with printed letters. Someone knew. The years of false security and happiness

I tried to remember how Pinocchio had become a real boy. It had something to do with being in a whale, maybe saving his father’s life; I hadn’t done anything like that. But surely a woman was more complex than a puppet boy and she might become herself not once-and-for-all but cyclically: waxing, waning, sometimes disappearing altogether.

There he was, he had kept saying later. He was alive and then he was dead and we were watching. We saw him at the instant it happened. We knew he was dead before his family did. Just an ordinary day. “And then—gone.”

Near-adolescent romantic haze befuddling me as I ascended stairs. But reality cannot be ignored; we must grow up.

one is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.