Today I read my journal entries I had written in the summer—the dead cold summer whose mornings I spent mourning—for what? (For whom.) I felt silly and sad. 

The Worst You Ever Feel

Until he was ten, whenever Aaron was sick or bleeding, his father would say the same thing: "May this be the worst pain you ever feel." 

Rebecca Makkai's "The Worst You Ever Feel"

"...there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it..."

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

"Anger isn't the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference."

Rebecca Pippert, Hope Has Its Reasons

"...the final symptom of despair is silence." 

Tobias Wolff

I used to write down my thoughts after these quotes, but I am beginning to lose them inside my head. Don't they speak for themselves? I ask wantonly. 

A Grief Observed: Chapter II

And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. ... Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

"We have all the time in the world," he had said. 

Break my eyes so that I may never hope to see him again.

August 25, 2011

Three days later I saw him. 

Montaigne

"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"

There is no reason that can explain friendship but friendship itself. And as for love, only loving.