Tags

desperation, fate, futility, life, mortality, survival

“The customs of man are like footholds carved into inhumanity, she thinks, something a person who’s been shipwrecked can clutch at to pull himself up, and nothing more. How much better it would be, she thinks, if the world were ruled by chance and not God.

–Jenny Erpenbeck, The End of Days

you

Tags

Desire, in search of lost time, infatuation, love, passion, reading another

You were a story. I was desperate to read you. I needed your words to be spoken inside my skull. I flipped through your pages, my thumb brushing your deckle edges, knowing I’d never have the time to finish. I let my index finger stroke a lone embossed line of letters, symbolic of such a small fragment of your beauty. How I wanted to savor your prose but I gasped in your vowels every time I came up for air. I marveled at your insights, treated the foreshadows like mere clouds passing by, and dog-eared pages with passages to which I yearned to return. To reread. To somehow share with the world. This. This! Beyond the page. Unfettered by language. You.