Young Woman

It's tragic how few people possess their souls before they die. Nothing is more rare in any man, says Emerson, than an act of his own. And it's quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. That's an Oscar Wilde quote.

Other animals live in the present. Humans cannot, so they invented hope.

I'm thinking of ending things. Once this thought arrives, it stays. IIt sticks, it lingers, it dominates. There's not much I can do about it, trust me. It doesn't go away. It's there whether I like it or not. It's there when I eat, when I go to bed. It's there when I sleep. It's there when I wake up. It's always there. Always.

I haven't been thinking about it for long. The idea's new. But it feels old at the same time. When did it start? What if this thought wasn't conceived by me, but planted in my mind, pre-developed? Is an spoken idea unoriginal?

Maybe I've actually known all along. Maybe this is how it was always going to end. Jake once said, "Sometimes the thought is closer to the truth, to reality, than an action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can't fake a thought."

Coming home is terrible whether the dogs lick your face or not; whether you have a wife or just a wife-shaped loneliness waiting for you. Coming home is terribly lonely, so that you think of the oppressive barometric pressure back where you have just come from with fondness, because everything's worse once you're home. You think of the vermin clinging to the grass stalks, long hours on the road, roadside assistance and ice creams, and the peculiar shapes of certain clouds and silences with longing because you did not want to return. Coming home is just awful. And the home-style silences and clouds contribute to nothing but the general malaise. Clouds, such as they are, are in fact suspect, and made from a different material than those you left behind. You yourself were cut from a different cloudy cloth, returned, remaindered, ill-met by moonlight, unhappy to be back, slack in all the wrong spots, seamy suit of clothes dishrag-ratty, worn. You return home moon-landed, foreign; the Earth's gravitational pull an effort now redoubled, dragging your shoelaces loose and your shoulders etching deeper the stanza of worry on your forehead. You return home deepened, a parched well linked to tomorrow by a frail strand of… Anyway… You sigh into the onslaught of identical days. One might as well, at a time… Well… Anyway… You're back. The sun goes up and down like a tired whore, the weather immobile like a broken limb while you just keep getting older. Nothing moves but the shifting tides of salt in your body. Your vision blears. You carry your weather with you, the big blue whale, a skeletal darkness. You come back with X-ray vision. Your eyes have become a hunger. You come home with your mutant gifts to a house of bone. Everything you see now, all of it: bone.

It's hard to describe people. It was so long ago, I barely remember. I mean… We never even talked, is the truth. I'm not even sure I registered him. There's a lot of people. I was there with my girlfriend… We were celebrating our anniversary, stopped in for a drink, and then this guy kept looking at me. It's a nuisance. The occupational hazard of… of being a female. You can't even go for a drink. Always being looked at. He was a creeper! You know? And I remember thinking, I wish my boyfriend was here. Which is… That's sort of sad, that being a woman, the only way a guy leaves you alone is if you're with another guy. Like, if… like… like you've been claimed. Like you're property, even then. Anyway, I can't… I can't remember what he looks like. Why would I? Nothing happened. Maybe it was just… I think it was just… Just one of thousands of such non-interactions in my life. It's like asking me to describe a mosquito that bit me on an evening 40 years ago. Well, you haven't seen anyone fitting that description, have you?

Everything wants to live, Jake. Viruses are just one more example of everything. Even fake, crappy movie ideas want to live. Like, they grow in your brain, replacing real ideas. That's what makes them dangerous.

It's good to remind yourself the world is larger than the inside of your own head.

It's a uniquely human fantasy that things will get better, born perhaps of the uniquely human understanding that things will not.

Anything an environment makes you feel is about you, not the environment, right?

Youth is admirable? How can you admire a person for their age? It's like admiring a certain point in a stream.

People like to think of themselves as points moving through time, but I think it's probably the opposite.

That's misogynistic claptrap! Freudian bullshit! A person, an adult, has to, at one point or another, take responsibility for who they are.

Happiness in a family is as nuanced as unhappiness.

Seems. That's the operative word. Time's another thing that exists only in the brain.