Asleep

Her eyes were those of someone who's just fallen in love, someone who sees nothing but her lover, someone who has no fear of anything. The eyes of someone who believes that every dream will come true, that reality will move if you just give it a push.

I never tell my boyfriend that I'm busy when I'm not. No matter how effective they are, cheap techniques like that just don't agree with me. So it's always okay, it's always all right. In my opinion the surest way to hook a man is to be as open with him as possible.

I was happy. I loved the night, I loved t so much it almost hurt. In the night everything seemed possible. I wasn't sleepy at all.

Nothing exists in this world but me and my bed…” (p. 141).

it'll be this kind of deep blue”she said. “The kind of color that somehow sucks your eyes and your ears and all your words —the color of a completely closed-in night

I really believe that no matter how old people get, they tend to change in certain ways depending on how people treat them - they change their colors.

It didn't matter whether he was nearby or far away. His image would drift up into your mind just when you least expected it, shocking you, making your chest pound. Making your heart ache.

What was important wasn't the fireworks, it was that we were together this evening, together in this place, looking up into the sky at the same time.

It was only after my head started reeling and my body started weaving and I tumbled into bed that I'd hear that soothing voice singing...The reverbations of that voice wandered sweetly, softly, working like a massage on the area of my heart that was the most tightly clenched, helping those knots to loosen. It was like the rush of waves, and like the laughter of people I'd met in all kinds of places, people I'd become friendly with and then separated from, and like the kind words all those people had said to me, and like the mewing of a cat I had lost, and like the mixture of noises that rang in the background in a place that was dear to me, a place far away, a place that no longer existed, and like the rushing of trees that whisked past my ears as I breathed in a scent of fresh greenery on a trip someplace... the voice was like a combination of all this.

If someone could give me some sort of evidence that what we're doing is really love, I'd be so tremendously relieved...

I wanted to hold everything in place with my thin little arm and weak spirit. I wanted to do what I could with my unreliable body to try and deal with the many scary things that were going to start happening from now on. I wanted to try.

But every time my thoughts reached this point, every time, my desire to speak would vanish. And so we remained precisely as we were, making no waves, at a standstill.

No, I just wanted to recapture the incredibly vivid love we'd had at first- the love I'd shared with the tall man standing next to me, with the man I adored.

Listen kiddo, by the time you grow up you'll have collected a whole lot of this 'dirt of life' stuff, right, you won't know where it's coming from but it'll pile up, and clothes and pearls won't look as beautiful to you as they do now -- that's for sure. The problem is that dirt, see? You can't ever settle down in one place, you've got to live like you're always, always staring way off into the distance.

Could it actually be true that tears help people to heal?

Từ bao giờ nhỉ, mỗi khi chỉ có một mình, tôi lại thấy buồn ngủ đến nhường này? Cơn buồn ngủ ập đến như nước triều dâng, không thể nào cưỡng lại được. Những giấc ngủ ấy lắng sâu vô tận, đến nỗi tiếng chuông điện thoại và cả tiếng xe cộ qua lại ngoài đường không cách gì lọt vào tai tôi được. Không còn đau đớn, cũng không còn muộn phiền, chỉ còn lại thế giới chìm đắm của giấc ngủ mà thôi. Lúc thức giấc tôi thấy hơi đơn độc, nhưng chỉ trong thoáng chốc. Nhìn ra bầu trời u ám, tôi mới biết mình đã ngủ khá lâu, để rồi lại vẩn vơ: “Mình đâu có định ngủ, vậy mà… tiêu tốn vô ích mất cả một ngày trời rồi…” Giữa tâm trạng bứt rứt như thể một nỗi ê chề, tôi bất chợt rùng mình. Không biết tự bao giờ, tôi cứ để mặc cho mình chìm vào những giấc ngủ ấy. Và cũng không biết tự bao giờ, tôi không còn cố chống lại nó nữa… Cái thời tôi lúc nào cũng tràn đầy khí thế, mắt luôn luôn tỉnh táo là hồi nào nhỉ? Thời đó đã xa lắm, như thể từ thời tiền sử, cái thời xa lắc mà người ta chỉ có thể hình dung ra được với một màn hình phẳng choán ngợp thứ sắc màu hoang sơ, sống động của dương xỉ và khủng long.

When people start getting depressed there’s just no end to it—things just seem to get worse and worse.

No recuerdo si esto me había ocurrido con anterioridad, pero cuando me enfrenté a las tinieblas de mi corazón, cuando me sentí herida en lo más hondo y me rompí en pedazos, exhausta, de improviso emergió de mi una fuerza inexplicable".

It felt like the inside of my stomach had turned completely black. Like a black hole. You could throw in anything you liked, I wouldn't even notice—my head was drifting through the clouds—everything would just go right in, things just kept going in... I was dragging all this black stuff along behind me, it was so heavy I could barely stand.

Non ricordavo più se in passato mi fosse già accaduto, ma nell'affrontare il buio che ognuno ha dentro di sé dopo una ferita profonda, distrutta dalla stanchezza, all'improvviso un'energia sconosciuta aveva cominciato a riemergere.

Soon it would be all over. All of this would wither away, it would all disappear. We'd go our separate ways. Again and again this conviction crashed over us.

But even in that very brief period of time I was made abundantly aware of the extent to which various things inside me had degenerated without my even knowing it. I'd always hated working, and I'd never cared much about the kinds of jobs I took or whether I had one or not or anything like that, and none of that had changed at all, it wasn't that...it was something like guts, the ability to move on to the next thing when I had to...

Even if this night we were spending together and everything else was just going to disappear into the past, that was all right - and it seemed to me that I held this alrightness preciously in my hands, and that it was glittering there.

Me es difícil resistirme a estas muestras de buenos modales. Tengo la impresión de que estas personas tan bien educadas jamás podrían hacerle nada malo a nadie. Yendo un poco más lejos, parece que sepan discernir a quién sí pueden hacérselo.

Mari had stopped responding to the outside world, she'd pulled the plug on the whole system, she was taking a break—I felt convinced of this. Because, as she saw things right now, life was nothing but pain.

See, the problem with you is that you aren’t bothered enough by what you might call the dirt of life.