i have no good reasons.

"'I think Pansy would do wonderfully well to marry you, and I don't know who should know it better than you. But you're not in love.'
'Ah, yes I am, Mrs Osmond!'
Isabel shook her head. 'You like to think you are while you sit here with me. But that's not how you strike me.'
'I'm not like the young man in the doorway. I admit that. But what makes it so unnatural? Could any one in the world be more loveable than Miss Osmond?'
'No one, possibly. But love has nothing to do with good reasons.'
'I don't agree with you. I'm delighted to have good reasons.'
'Of course you are. If you were really in love you wouldn't care a straw for them.'"

Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 494.

update

7. i am newly clumsy.
6. i am a bursting balloon.
5. i am a disappointed future.
4. i am too far from thankful.
3. i am woefully self-indulgent.
2. i am an open bible and a closed mind.
1. i am without you.
0. i hate that that is my number 1.

retail

new pajamas don't actually make me feel any less sad, but there's something a little bit nicer about being sad while wearing new pajamas.

waiting for an escape

in a year when everything is broken and falling apart and wilting away, my dad has been so kind to me.

fragments

I once read the sentence, 'I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake'. That's true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen.

* * *

Don't hold yourself like that cause you'll hurt your knees.
Well I kissed your mouth and back - but that's all I need.
Don't build your world around / volcanoes melt you down...

And what I am to you is not real,
What I am to you, you do not need,
What I am to you is not what you mean to me:
You give me miles and miles of mountains and I'll ask for the sea.

Don't throw yourself like that in front of me.
I kissed your mouth, your back - is that all you need?
Don't drag my love around / volcanoes melt me down...

I kissed your mouth.
You do not need me.

* * *

Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.



(C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed; Damien Rice, 'Volcano'; Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking)

You never really liked the Psalms that much.

If an enemy were insulting me,
I could endure it;
if a foe were raising himself against me,
I could hide from him.
But it is you, a man like myself,
my companion, my close friend,
with whom I once enjoyed sweet fellowship
as we walked with the throng at the house of God.

Psalm 55:12-14

Unintentionally suspended -

I'm waiting and it hurts a lot. Please hurry up.

Liar.

"Private assurances are terribly easy to break; they evaporate like the morning dew. After all, it is only your word against mine when I say that you misunderstood me and I didn't really say or mean what you thought. We are deeply prone to self-deception in this area above all."

From a book by Christopher Ash that was lying on Eirian's bedside table the night before she got married. On why marriage needs to be a public act.