2011

A year of waking up to thoughts of you. Thoughts of those sun-lit days of long ago, days brimming simply and seemingly with undoubtable promise, diamond-bright moments where time had no meaning and every breath was your name. When I thought two people could never have been happier, with you and by me, partner to partner. A year of long afternoons of grief and staring blankly at the light pouring in through the leaves outside my window, and dappling my bed, and my body, bathing in this softly, slowly fading pool of light, forgetting about the hours slipping past while thinking in wonderment how the last five years have gone by, just like that. A long, silent, still, stagnant year of mornings turning into afternoons turning into long-drawn, cold, quiet nights filled with little else but this indescribable, harrowing, pain-wrought alchemy of sadness, helplessness, exhaustion, and crushing, crushing, loss. May next year be a better and happier one. And for all.

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It takes forever to forget the past. And then longer again to see that forgetting the past is a vivid illusion. ...

In my mind, I said: 'Conor is gone, but the Lord is here. My life will pass and I will never taste a kiss on my mouth again.'

-- Andrew O'Hagan, Be Near Me

heavenly questions

How could I say we wanted nothing else

And nothing less and nothing more than this,

To find each other's spirit's melting point

And changing states, never such nakedness

Between such two, my bluest veins to kiss,

Never such certainty, the selfsame quest

Not to possess, but to be known; to know;

Not needing it confirmed, confirming it.
And in a place arrived at on our knees,

He tugged my face to his, as if he took

His own life in his hands; all gentle ways;

A lifelong quest for you; and won't let go

Unless you leave your fingerprints on me;

A gaze returned, the softest counterblow;

And gathering my hair in gentle fists,

Persuasion's force with no one to persuade,

Only persuading hairpins from my hair,

Their falling on the floor, a plunder-gift;

And nothing lost, but found and found again;

And not conquest, but everything in play

Given, not taken; taken anyway,

And not to keep in any case; but kept;

Possessed, but not in order to possess;

Selfsame, self-owned, self-given, self-possessed,

And all in play. But conquered nonetheless.

-- Gjertrude Schnackenberg, Heavenly Questions

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What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gavel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.

-- John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos