The Safekeep

That's what happens when people die. They take themselves with them and you never ever find out anything new about them ever.

What was joy, anyway. What was the worth of happiness that left behind a crater thrice the size of its impact.

There isn’t a version of me that could’ve looked away from you.

She had made the kitchen a lovely place. Isabel could cry at it: at how a room could be made, and left behind, and turn terrible by way of absence. How a space could miss a person.

She had held a pear in her hand and she had eaten it skin and all. She had eaten the stem and she had eaten its seeds and she had eaten its core, and the hunger still sat in her like an open maw. She thought: I can hold you and find that I still miss your body. She thought: I can listen to you speak and still miss the sound of your voice.

She thought: I can hold you and find that I still miss your body. She thought: I can listen to you speak and still miss the sound of your voice.

She would never leave a room again and not leave half of her behind.

I think she wants to eat me. I think she would inhale me if she could. I think she'd crawl herself inside of me if she thought that's where she'd find something that I've kept hidden from her. God help me. Would I let her? I would let her. God help me she looks at me. God help me I don't want her to look away.

Who are you?' She said, 'Have you always been like this? Have you just been waiting to happen?

Isabel had never known loneliness like that, one that arrived without the promise of leaving.

She belonged to the house in the sense that she had nothing else, no other life than the house, but the house, by itself, did not belong to her.

She thought that might have been joy, or something like it. Something that feels sad as much as it feels like love.

She was not wanted. That was the long and the short of it: she had learned want, briefly and hungrily. A span of a day, two days. She had learned the shape of it, the quick taste of it. She had reached out, foolishly, and she was not wanted in return.

How quickly did the belly of despair turn itself over into hope, the give of the skin of overripe fruit.

Found that love was a sickly thing that punished you for each step you took in its direction.

There's no determination there... I dislike you - quite effortlessly.

The canals had frozen over. Isabel tested one with her foot and found it solid, and then stood on it in wonder; a miracle, she thought, to stand so solidly on what could also engulf you.

It embarrassed her, her own reflection. She had strong ideas of beauty that she did not find in herself: how tender the face must be, how thick the hair. She had strong thoughts about what it meant, to care too much about beauty. To want it, to search for it in oneself. In another. They weren't nice thoughts.

Hendrik looked at her, startled, and she wanted to tell him - wanted to be done with it, make it someone else's burden. No one knew of her heart and no one knew of her grief and it was torture.

She was pretty in a way that men thought women ought to be pretty.

How strange can the body be. I do not know it, never know what it wants. Does anyone know their body, truly? I wonder.

If you are mine then I am yours. Do you understand? If I stay, if I'm yours then you must keep me, and I can never-

She felt she was not who she once was. She felt that this should be visible from a great distance.

Morning rose in the quiet chord of winter's pink.

Isabel tried to breathe through the misery of holding someone else's hurt within oneself and stayed awake like a guard dog - like there was something to keep out. Like there was someone trying to get in.

Her perfume bullied itself around the house

The thought — too heavy, it's too heavy — a desire for someone to take it away from her. The plates, the walls, the weight of her hair, her own damned hands — to let someone else have them. Be done with it.