A Home at the End of the World

I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.

The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.

we become the stories we tell ourselves

Perhaps, in the extravagance of youth, we give away our devotions easily and all but arbitrarily, on the mistaken assumption that we’ll always have more to give.

This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.

I'm talking about a little truth-in-packaging here. To be perfectly frank, you don't quite look like yourself. And if you walk around looking like someone other than who you are, you could end up getting the wrong job, the wrong friends, who knows what-all. You could end up with somebody else's life." I shrugged again, and smiled. "This is my life," I said. "It doesn't seem like the wrong one.

I am beginning to understand the true difference between youth and age. Young people have time to make plans and think of new ideas. Older people need their whole energy to keep up with what’s already been set in motion.

Here is what unsayable about us: Jonathan and I are members of a team so old nobody else could join even if we wanted them to. What binds us is stronger than sex. It is stronger than love. We're related. Each of us is the other born into a different flesh.

We’d hoped for love of a different kind, love that knew and forgave our human frailty but did not miniaturize our grander ideas of ourselves.

I wanted a settled life and a shocking one. Think of Van Gogh, cypress trees and church spires under a sky of writhing snakes. I was my father's daughter. I wanted to be loved by someone like my tough judicious mother and I wanted to run screaming through the headlights with a bottle in my hand. That was the family curse. We tended to nurse flocks of undisciplined wishes that collided and canceled each other out. The curse implied that if we didn't learn to train our desires in one direction or another we were likely to end up with nothing. Look at my father and mother today. I married in my early twenties. When that went to pieces I loved a woman. At both of those times and at other times, too, I believed I had focused my impulses and embarked on a long victory over my own confusion. Now, in my late thirties, I knew less than ever about what I wanted. In place of youth's belief in change I had begun to feel a nervous embarrassment that ticked inside me like a clock. I'd never meant to get this far in such an unfastened condition. (p.142)

I’m not this unusual,” she said. “It’s just my hair.” She looked at Bobby and she looked at me, with an expression at once disdainful and imploring. She was forty, pregnant, and in love with two men at once. I think what she could not abide was the zaniness of her life. Like many of us, she had grown up expecting romance to bestow dignity and direction. “Be brave,” I told her. Bobby and I stood before her, confused and homeless and lacking a plan, beset by an aching but chaotic love that refused to focus in the conventional way. Traffic roared behind us. A truck honked its hydraulic horn, a monstrous, oceanic sound. Clare shook her head, not in denial but in exasperation. Because she could think of nothing else to do, she began walking again, more slowly, toward the row of trees.

How are you feeling, man?" he asks me. "Great," I tell him, and it is purely the truth. Doves clatter up out of a bare tree and turn at the same instant, transforming themselves from steel to silver in the snow-blown light. I know at that moment that the drug is working. Everything before me has become suddenly, radiantly itself. How could Carlton have known this was about to happen? "Oh," I whisper. His hand settles on my shoulder. "Stay loose, Frisco," he says. "There's not a thing in this pretty world to be afraid of. I'm here." I am not afraid. I am astonished. I had not realized until this moment how real everything is. A twig lies on the marble at my feet, bearing a cluster of hard brown berries. The broken-off end is raw, white, fleshly. Trees are alive. "I'm here," Carlton says again, and he is.

I suppose at heart it was the haircut that did it; that exploded the ordinary order of things and showed me the possibilities that had been there all along, hidden among the patterns in the wallpaper. In a different age, we used to take acid for more or less the same reason.

You don't necessarily meet a lot of people in this world. Not when you let yourself get distracted by music and the passing of hours.

It was either the wind or the spirit of the house itself, briefly unsettled by our nocturnal absence but to old to be surprised by the errands born from the gap between what we can imagine and what we can in fact create.

I knew how I sounded - slow and oafish, like the cousin who gets ditched and goes on playing alone, as if he'd planned it that way. I couldn't quite tell her about the daily beauty, how I didn't tire of seeing 6 a.m. light on the telephone wires. When I was younger, I'd expected to grow out of the gap between the self I knew and what I heard myself say. I'd expected to feel more like one single person.

He seemed to believe that from such humble, inert elements as flour, shortening, and drab little envelopes of yeast, life itself could be produced.

Unfamiliar insects produced a soft but insistent chirp; a crisp whir like the sound the earth itself might make rolling through the darkness if we all kept quiet enough to hear it. The lights of the condominium complex shone. They were not far away. Still, they looked almost too real and close to touch. They were like holes punched in the night, leaking light from another, more animated world. For a moment I could imagine what it would be like to be a ghost—to walk forever through a silence deeper than silence, to apprehend but never quite reach the lights of home.

He moved in a world of chaos of self, fearful and astonished to be here, right here, alive in a pine-paneled bedroom.

Ránk telepedett a csönd, az a fajta jótét hallgatás, amely időről időre megszakítja idegenek hétköznapi beszélgetését, és lehetővè teszi, hogy baj nélkül visszatérjenek életük ismerős keretei közé.

Nemohol som povedať, že som šťastný. Nebolo to také jednoduché ako šťastie. Bol som len prítomný, azda prvý raz za svoju dospelosť. Tá chvíľa nebola ničím výnimočná. Ale mal som tu chvíľu a mal som ju úplne. Prebývala vo mne. Uvedomil som si, že aj keď umriem, aspoň som spoznal toto:spojenie s vlastným životom, s jeho chybami a ironickými úspechmi.

You don’t necessarily meet a lot of people in this world. Not when you let yourself get distracted by music and the passing of hours.

I had blundered again, obscurely, and rather than go on worrying over my behavior, I decided to just give in and dislike Alice.

It seemed the morrow's holding had become a sort of peoples park in the suburbs of Cleveland. The other on the block, those who still lived in the fading jerry-built ranch houses with birdbaths or plaster dwarves on their lawns had appropriated it. I could imagine them gathering there at dusk, their children swaying creakily on the swings as the women planted sunflower seeds and murmured over the day's events. It was slightly criminal, an unfounded claim made by people who were not prospering but only getting by, and as such the property had passed beyond reclamation. To own this parcel of land you would have to wrest it back from those who had learned to care for it. If you leveled their tiny works and put up a new house you would be an invader, not much different from a colonial, and the land would be tainted until your house fell down again. This suburban quarter-acre had returned to its wilder purpose, and could not be redomesticated without a fight that would leave the victor's hands stained.

I used to want to be a cheerleader,” I told them. “Before I decided to just go to hell.