The Road / Cormac McCarthy

Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
You forget some things, don't you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
"To live a creative life we must lose our fear of being wrong." Joseph Chilton Pearce

"If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed,
except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I."
Michel de Montaigne, "Of Friendship"

Thursday, July 14, 2011

You


The very act of writing assumes, to begin with, that someone cares to hear what you have to say.
Tobias Wolff
  So finish your coffee. Let’s have a conversation. 
I woke up one morning with this unbreakable fact inside my eyes that you are irreplaceable, that you are impossible to be substituted by anything or anyone else. You are not basil that can be traded in for parsley on my pasta. I cannot fabricate you like I created Paul (whom I wrote unsent letters to, justifying myself that he is real because he exists in my own reality). You are not imagined or supposed. You are here reading me. (Paul could never do that; he could only be read.) You certainly surpass my idea of a perfect character.
I wish I could tell you exactly the things you need me to say. 

There needed to be weeks and months of uninterrupted time to say all the things that needed to be said.
Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

I want to read your mind. What are you thinking about? You look nostalgic. Say it. 
Home. 
I’ve not been home for three years. I don’t know what it looks like, save for the detail that it’s on the seventeenth floor. I always had to move back and forth between two countries so that the coming would become the going and the going would become the coming back. I had to leave the people I loved. Or they left me. (Please don’t leave me yet.) Perhaps this is why I read books so much. Books never left me. The characters all stayed--as if belonging home--in the pages which were bound, on which I could underline, fold to remember, come back to. And one day you came into my life as if you walked out from a book, and I found that you're better than books, that you defy the impossibilities of literature. 
So I write. To go back home, to wake up again, to be your coffee as you are mine. 

No comments:

Post a Comment