Lisey's Story

Sometimes she'd go a whole day without thinking of him or missing him. Why not? She had quite a full life, and really, he'd often been hard to deal with and hard to live with. A project, the Yankee oldtimers like her very own Dad might have said. And then sometimes a day would come, a gray one (or a sunny one) when she missed him so fiercely she felt empty, not a woman at all anymore but just a dead tree filled with cold November blow. She felt like that now, felt like hollering his name and hollering him home, and her heart turned sick with the thought of the years ahead and she wondered what good love was if it came to this, to even ten seconds of feeling like this.

When it was done and I went to sleep, I lay awake and listened to the clock on your nightstand and the wind outside and understood that I was really home, that in bed with you was home, and something that had been getting close in the dark was suddenly gone. It could not stay. It had been banished. It knew how to come back, I was sure of that, but it could not stay and I could really go to sleep. My heart cracked with gratitude. I think it was the first gratitude I’ve ever really known. I lay there beside you and the tears rolled down the sides of my face and onto the pillow. I loved you then and I love you now and I have loved you every second in between. I don’t care if you understand me. Understanding is vastly overrated, but nobody ever gets enough safety. I’ve never forgotten how safe I felt with that thing gone out of the darkness.

Then, instead of telling her that where there was life there was hope, or to let a smile be her umbrella, or that it was always darkest just before the dawn, or anything else that had just lately fallen out of the dog's ass, she simply held her. Because sometimes only holding was best. That was one of the things she had taught that man whose last name she had taken for her own--that sometimes it was best to be quiet; sometimes it was best to just shut your everlasting mouth and hang on, hang on, hang on.

She nods. You're good for the ones you love. You want to be good for the ones you love, because you know that your time with them will end up being too short, no matter how long it is.

Lying in the bed that had once held two, Lisey thought alone never felt more lonely than when you woke up and discovered you still had the house to yourself. That you and the mice in the walls were the only ones still breathing.

Because who would ever want to get close to another person if they knew how hard the letting-go part was? In your heart they only die a little at a time, don't they? Like a plant when you go away on a trip and forget to ask a neighbor to poke in once in awhile with the old watering-can, and its so sad—

The harder you had to work to open a package, the less you ended up caring about what was inside.

Time apparently did nothing but blunt grief’s sharpest edge so that it hacked rather than sliced.

There's a lot of things people think they can't do and then discover they can when they find themselves tight-wired.

Ninety-eight percent of what goes on in people's heads is none of their smucking business.

I loved you then and I love you now and I have loved you every second in between.

I’m so afraid that all I can reach will lead me to all I dare not see.

The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shirring sound; these are the sounds of dead voices on dead records floating down the broken shaft of memory. When I turn to you to ask if you remember, When I turn to you in our bed

It's the pool where we all go down to drink, to swim, to catch a little fish from the edge of the shore; it's also the pool where some hardy souls go out in their flimsy wooden boats after the big ones. It is the pool of life, the cup of imagination, and she has an idea that different people see different versions of it, but with two things ever in common: it's always about a mile deep in the Fairy Forest, and it's always sad. Because imagination isn't the only thing this place is about.

You're good for the ones you love. You WANT to be good for the ones you love. Because you know that your time with them will end up being too short, no matter how long it is.

And the purple parted before it, snapping back like skin after a slash, and what it let out wasn't blood but light: amazing orange light that filled her heart and mind with a terrible mixture of joy, terror, and sorrow. No wonder she had repressed this memory all these years. It was too much. Far too much. The light seemed to give the fading air of evening a silken texture, and the cry of a bird struck her ear like a pebble made of glass. A cap of breeze filled her nostrils with a hundred exotic perfumes: frangipani, bougainvillea, dusty roses, and oh dear God, night-blooming cereus... And rising above one horizon came the orange mansion of the moon, bloated and burning cold, while the sun sank below the other, boiling in a crimson house of fire. She thought that mixture of furious light would kill her with its beauty.

She was frightened because she was realizing – too late, too late – that what's done can't be undone, and what's remembered must somehow be lived with ever after. Even of the memories are insane.

And she sees that the moonlight is losing its orange glow. It has become buttery, and will soon turn to silver.

The exhausted mind is obsession's easiest prey.

Some things you never forgot. She had come to believe that the very things the practical world dismissed as ephemera—things like songs and moonlight and kisses—were sometimes the things that lasted the longest. They might be foolish, but they defied forgetting. And that was good. That was good.

Whoever said misery loves company was full of shite. Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, however... that guy was onto something.

I was lost in the dark and you found me. I was hot - so hot - and you gave me ice.

There are great drifting theatre curtains in the sky, and they change color as she watches: green goes to purple, purple to vermilion, vermilion to a queer bloody shade of red she cannot name. Russet perhaps comes close, but that isn't it exactly. She thinks no one has ever named the shade she's seeing.

I think most kids have a place they go to when they're scared or lonely or just plain bored. They call it NeverLand or The Shire, Boo'ya Moon if they've got big imaginations and make it up for themselves. Most of them forget. The talented few - like Scott - harness their dreams and turn them into horses.

I love you with all that passes for my heart. I suspect that kind of all-out love becomes a burden to a woman in time, but it's the only kind I have to give.