He asked me when I fell in love with him and I knew it sounded dramatic to say the moment I saw him, so I told him this story of my grandma who had Alzheimer’s- she forgot her name and the words for fruit and food, she forgot her address and how to use the washroom, all her life lost to the disease. The only thing she remembered was her son’s name and when that began to fade, the one thing she always remembered was that she loved him, even in illness, even in insanity. She saw this 6 foot 2 man with a scrubby beard and she didn’t know him but she said she trusted him, she asked him to hold her hand when she died. When does memory end and love begin? All I know is- she loved him before she remembered him.
-Ritika Jyala, excerpt from The world is a sphere of ice and our hands are made of fire
“You don’t meet the people you love, you recognize them.”
― Anna Gavalda, “Life, Only Better” , trans. Tina Kover
“You and I know each other in our bones”
― Kurt Vonnegut, from a letter to Nanny Vonnegut
“but everyone had this patina
of slightly bruised longing, this shimmer of
I think I knew you when we were children,
this look of I’ve loved you ever since you
were born
and probably longer than that”
― Paul Hostovsky, from “Everyone was Beautiful,” Dear Truth (Main Street Rag, 2009)
“He’s been here in my heart before I even knew him. Understand? He’s always been here. Always.”
― Sandra Cisneros , from Woman at Hollering Creek: Stories; “Never Marry a Mexican,”
“You came into my life–not as one comes to visit…but as one comes to a kingdom where all the rivers have been waiting for your reflection, all the roads, for your steps…”
— Vladimir Nabokov, in a letter to Véra Slonim (1923), Letters to Véra
“I love you. I feel as though we were never strangers, you and I, not even for a moment.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, from a letter to Mathilde Trampedach
“Eventually soulmates meet, for they have the same hiding place.”
— Robert Brault
“Here when I say “I never want to be without you,”
somewhere else I am saying
“I never want to be without you again.” And when I touch you
in each of the places we meet in all of the lives we are,
it’s with hands that are dying and resurrected.
When I don’t touch you it’s a mistake in any life,
in each place and forever.
— Bob Hicok, Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem
“She said that she had been searching for my eyes in the crowd because she felt as if she were talking to my heart.”
— Audre Lorde, from “Zami: A New Spelling of my Name,” published c. 1982
“Who knows? perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening…”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, from You who never arrived (tr. by Stephen Mitchell); Uncollected Poems: 1913–1918
oh, i am finally old enough to know why my parents took so long to grab their coats. why they would ask us to get ready to go only to sit down for another round of coffee. what would i tell myself, at 10 years old? it’s okay. sit down with them too. take in the extra hour with your friend and her family. when you get home, write down every moment in your diary. one day you will be older and you will be waving goodbye to your best friend, and you will turn the key to start your beat up little car engine, and you will look back over your shoulder. her hair will be blowing in the wind and she will be beautiful and you will be, for a moment, struck by all of it. what you will feel is so wide and nameless that it will engulf you. and you will think of being 14 and kicking her under the table in math every time you wanted to whisper something behind the teacher’s back. you will think about how long the days felt, and how you could hold her hand whenever you wished, but you didn’t. and you will think about all of the people you could have lingered with. and you will wish, more than you have ever felt a wish, that the universe just gave you that - more time to linger. more time to say - i love you. i know i need to leave, but i don’t want to leave you. and when i go, i am leaving a piece of my heart that lingers too.
one more round of coffee. the days are so short, and you are so lovely.
thomas merton // “eurydice” sarah ruhl // ernest hemingway // anis mojgani “in the pockets of small gods” // lemony snicket // franz kafka “the castle” // @fridayiminlovemp3 (mitski “strawberry blonde”) // mitski “pink in the night” // khalil gibran // gustave flaubert from a letter to george sand, 1876 // danez smith “acknowledgments” // “love freely” E.C. @desultory-suggestions
![typodescript:
“funeral:
“D.W. Winnicott
”
[text ID: It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.]
”](https://64.media.tumblr.com/3ee4059b7416d1f694cd364b45fc70ba/c53bfa1cb351234c-1f/s1280x1920/3972afadd5b2df8a72de5beb45aa114f7820b461.png)
