Violet Young

You appreciate something more when it occurs as infrequently as an eclipse.

I was sure he could read my mind. That the only thing standing in his way, the only thing that made my face incomprehensible to him, was his lack of confidence in himself.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. So, someone tell me what makes the heart grow less fond.

Sometimes I think they’ve all been the same, my lovers, versions of each other, which is cruel, because they would hate to stand in a lineup and be found indistinguishable from one another.

But there was space between us, so much space between us. The space that friendship opens up, the space that friendship keeps forever pushed apart with its two strong arms, like someone breaking up a fist fight.

This is the pain of feeling that at some point in my life, things got more complicated when they were supposed to get simpler.

In our triumvirate there was no hierarchy. No one ever stayed at the top for very long. A rotating presidency, I guess you could call it, usually dictated by whoever was the least moody on any given day.

Build up enough memories, a pastiche of how things really went, and they calcify into something like a sculpture in the mind. The real person, however, wavers and darts like a dusky shadow on the grass.

Death causes all the events that come after it to be heightened, to be either worse or better than they would otherwise appear.

We choose a story and narrate all memories to the specifications of that story. Or worse: a single memory, however blurry, can start a story, can be the one random moment that sets a lifelong story in motion.

Some day I hoped we would be able to reward ourselves with these old familiar pleasures, instead of trying to forget the future and to fade, camouflaged, into the backdrop of the past.

I realize that I have been so in love with him, and so afraid of that feeling, that I was unable to actually see him, to see what was in his eyes, to imagine they could express anything good, anything serious, anything real.

We’re free, at least for a few more days, but we don’t seem to know how to let loose the way the teenagers do, the way we used to. We find it harder to lie, harder to conceal bad deeds.

Here’s a way to get over someone: live a monastic existence, appreciating the wideness of an unshared bed, and write songs or books or unclassifiable material about them until the material itself becomes more interesting than the person ever was.

Listening to the same music over and over is closing down, opening little windows of the self only to the parts of the world one likes best: bits of the past, certain people, certain feelings.

My life was a mess. It helped to hear a person confront his own mess, a row of fallen dominoes, to the backdrop of such transportive and sad music.

Our friendship might be too precious to disrupt, but the pain of not disrupting it is intolerable.

I want to be the type of person who’s too busy to be sad and lonely, so busy the sadness evaporates.