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"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: It goes on."
--ROBERT FROST
Fourteen days since the mess began. My life isn't worse, exactly--just smaller. Look up long enough and you start to feel your infinitesimality. The difference between alive and not--that's something. But from where the stars are watching, there is almost no difference between varieties of alive, between me and the newly mown grass I'm lying on right now. We are both astonishments, the closest thing in the known universe to a miracle.
"And then a Plank in Reason, broke / And I dropped down, and down--"
--EMILY DICKINSON
There are about a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way--one for every person who ever lived, more or less. I was thinking about that beneath the sky tonight, unseasonably warm, as good a showing of stars as one gets around here. Something about looking up always makes me feel like I'm falling.
Earlier, I heard my brother crying in his room, and I stood next to the door for a long time, and I know he knew I was there because he tried to stop sobbing when the floorboards creaked under my footstep, and I just stood out there for the longest time, staring at his door, unable to open it.
"Even the silence / has a story to tell you."
--JACQUELINE WOODSON
The worst part of being truly alone is you think about all the times you wished that everyone would just leave you be. Then they do, and you are left being, and you turn out to be terrible company.
"The world is a globe--the farther you sail, the closer to home you are."
--TERRY PRATCHETT
Sometimes I open Google Maps and zoom in on random places where he might be. S came by last night to walk us through what happens now--what happens if he's found, what happens if he's not--and at one point he said, "You understand that I'm referring now not to the physical person but to the legal entity." The legal entity is what hovers over us, haunting our home. The physical person is in that map somewhere.
"I am in love with the world."
--MAURICE SENDAK
We always say that we are beneath the stars. We aren't, of course--there is no up or down, and anyway the stars surround us. But we say we are beneath them, which is nice. So often English glorifies the human--we are whos, other animals are thats--but English puts us beneath the stars, at least.
Eventually, a she showed up.
"What's past is prologue."
--WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Seeing your past--or a person from your past--can for me at least be physically painful. I'm overwhelmed by a melancholic ache--and I want the past back, no matter the cost. It doesn't matter that it won't come back, that it never even actually existed as I remember it--I want it back. I want things to be like they were, or like I remember them having been: Whole. But she doesn't remind me of the past, for some reason. She feels present tense.
The next entry was posted late the night he'd given me the money, and more or less confirmed that the she was me.
"Awake, dear heart, awake. Thou hast slept well. Awake."
--WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
I wonder if I fucked it up. But if I hadn't done it, I'd have wondered something else. Life is a series of choices between wonders.
"The isle is full of noises."
--WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The thought, would she like me if I weren't me, is an impossible thought. It folds in upon itself. But what I mean is would she like me if the same body and soul were transported into a different life, a lesser life? But then, of course, I wouldn't be me. I would be someone else. The past is a snare that has already caught you. A nightmare, Dedalus said, from which I am trying to awake.
And then the most recent entry:
"This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine."
--WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
