| W: | Do you fall out of love, really? I mean, I realise it slows down and dims, but does it actually go away for you? |
| S: | i think the urgency definitely does, you know like the fluttery. the fluttery goes away. |
| W: | Yes, I know the urgency does, but the feeling itself, of thinking of them without really expecting to, going over old nostalgia, the whole tu-me-manques bit--do you ever get to the point where it's like "that's nice, dear, but that was another country, and besides, the wench is dead"? |
| S: | i think so, but that's part of the urgency to me. it just becomes pleasant to know them, but you don't really feel like you're missing out on anything by not being around them all the time. |
| S: | i mean i dunno. eventually the effort of thinking about them outweighs the good feelings. you know it's like a scratch-n-sniff that's been scratched too much. |
| Wendy: | Right.... Sometimes I think you're a romantic and then you use actual words to describe feelings to me and I look at the world and I wonder who ever let you near a keyboard. |
And everyone you love is made of stardust, and I know sometimes you cannot even breathe deeply, and the night sky is no home,
and you have cried yourself to sleep enough times that you are down to your last two percent, but
nothing is infinite,
not even loss.
You are made of the sea and the stars, and one day
you are going to find yourself again.
Self-love is an ending, she said,
and not a beginning. Love means love
of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.
These poems, she said….
You are, he said,
beautiful.
That is not love, she said rightly.
“I’m not explaining this right. What happened was this. There were these beautiful feelings and loose little pleasures inside me. And this woman was something like an assembly line for my soul. I run these little pieces of myself through her and I come out complete. Now do you follow me?”
― Carson McCullers, A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud
“She wished there was some place where she could go to hum it out loud. Some kind of music was too private to sing in a house cram fall of people. It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
“Love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved.”
― Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories
She knew if she loved him she could make him
happy, but she didn’t. Or she did, but it sank
into itself like a hole and curled up content.
Surrounded by the blur of her own movements, the
thought of making him happy was very dear to her.
She moved it from place to place, a surprise she
never opened. She slept alone at night, soul of
a naked priest in her sweet body. Small soft hands,
a bread of desire rising in her stomach. When she
lay down with the man she loved and didn’t, the
man opened and opened. Inside him an acrobat
tumbled over death. And walked thin wires with
nothing above or below. She cried, he was so
beautiful in his scarlet tights and white face
the size of a dime.
—Jayne Anne Phillips, “Happy”
Art Credit Nikolaos Gyzis, The soul of the artist, 1897
D: Valentine’s Day is over!
