Maybe that was the secret to happiness, I thought, being free of the responsibility of yourself.
I was so tired. I just wanted to curl up with someone, anyone, even him, and sleep until work on Monday. I wanted to feel someone’s, anyone’s, hands on me, even if it was in that way I hate, the fingers all over my face and jaw.
But I had no idea who this person might be, or who any of the people might be who sat at that table and watched me at the door and claimed to have feelings not exactly for me, but at me.
And as he leaned in to kiss me, my eye saw his open mouth grow larger and larger until it seemed it could swallow me whole.
There had been times when I thought I might be with you indefinitely, something approaching an entire life. But then when there was only a finite amount of time, a thing we could both see the limit of, I wasn’t so sure.
He was so far away now, or maybe he just looked distant because we were imaging different things for our future.
Tell me, is there someone in your life who’s been sharing your life too closely? A friend or a loved one? Is there someone who’s been taking up your time and not giving any of it back?
I did have a friend,’ I said.’And your friend trespassed upon you,’ the Wally replied.
There was no better way to live, or worse. It was all terrible, and you had to do it constantly,
She said that everything that disappeared from our side went over to theirs, where they kept living normal lives, waiting for the things still lingering with us to join them, and make the world whole once more.
I had seen the few things I cared about forget me seamlessly. I had seen the life I never really fit into heal up around my absence like a wound scabbed over.
I find it increasingly difficult to speak of my feelings at will.
There’s a kind of pressure that your own life muscles onto you, to do something just like you would do, to behave just like yourself.
There was a hazy damp film in his eyes that I recognized from emotions in old movies, projected large on darkened screens.
She was truly happy for the first time in her life, and it felt just like living in a small room painted all white, with windows looking out onto impenetrable forest.
Outside the windows, everything is getting darker. First the yellow dies from the light, then the green and pink. The world is a blue version of itself, momentarily, before the blue snuffs out, too and it is all night.
I missed you more now than I had when I lost you. I was forgetting the bad things faster than I forgot the good, and the changing ratio felt a little bit like falling in love even though I was actually speaking to you less and less.
Karen couldn’t understand how these encounters had marked him, and she had always believed that a person without trauma was dangerous in some way, untested. Also bizarre: in all of his stories, Dan ended up succeeding.
The past was just a place where uncontrolled freaks you had never consciously decided to include in your life entered it anyway and staggered around, breaking things.