Where Reasons End

Perfect. Imperfect. A pair of adjectives that come over and again, in all seasons, day in and day out, taunting us, judging us, isolating us, turning our isolation into illness. Is there a more accomplished adjective than perfect? Perfect is free from comparison, perfect rejects superlative. We can always be good, do better, try our best, but how perfect can we be before we can love ourselves and let others love us? And who, my dear child, has taken the word lovable out of your dictionary and mine, and replaced it with perfect?

I had long ago banished a few words from my dictionary: never, always, forever, words that equate one day to another, one moment to another. Time is capricious. To say never or always or forever is a childish way to reason with caprice.

The unspeakable is a wound that stays open always, always, and forever.

Time is a difficult debt to pay off. Impossible.

Words provided to me-- loss, grief, sorrow, bereavement, trauma-- never seemed to be able to speak precisely of what was plaguing me. One can and must live with loss and grief and sorrow and bereavement. Together they frame this life, as solid as the ceiling and the floor and the walls and the doors. But there is something else, like a bird that flies away at the first sign of one's attention, or a cricket chirping in the dark, never settling close enough for one to tell from which corner the song comes.

I wish you had made me an enemy, I said, rather than yourself. Mothers, i thought, would be perfect for that role. You can't be that for me, Mommy, Nikolai said. I've found a perfect enemy in myself.

Not knowing is okay, he had once said, but pretending to know is not.

Dreams are but prologue to days, epilogue to other days, written by our faltering minds.

People talk about grief coming and going like waves, but I am not a breakwater, I am not a boat, I am not a statue left on a rocky shore, tested for its endurance.

Some people live by images, some by sounds. It's words for me. Words said to me. Words not meant for me but picked up by me in any case. Words in their written form. Words that make sense and words that make nonsense.

For some people a façade is necessary even with friends

What's wrong with being sharp and bright? Nikolai said. The world never tires of dimming the bright and blunting the sharp, I said. It's good to avoid suffering when one can.

Never apologize, I said, for what you have let go.

Deadline as a word used to fascinate me, a word that connects time and space and death with such absoluteness.

Words fall short, yes, but sometimes their shadows can reach the unspeakable.

A parent should never be a child’s biographer, I thought.

This real night is and will be a permanent part of our life.

Does a person commit suicide because he doesn’t want to live, or doesn’t know how to live?

And not knowing must be close to what people call a wound.

How can one know a fact without accepting it?

Silence is the best defense and the best offense.

The line between self-deception and willpower is often blurred, I said.

Do you feel settled?” "If you mean something sinking to the bottom, he said, yes, I feel quite settled. Sedimented." "What is it that sedimented?" I asked. “Everything about me that used to disturb me.” He said. “I’m all clear now, clear and perfect, just the way I want.” “Nothing will come to disturb the sediment again?” “What probability to you think for that to happen?” I did not know if I were sad or relieved, or sadder because I was relieved. “You see, that is your problem. When you don’t have an expert command of adjectives, you don’t know how you feel.” “Perhaps I don’t want to know.” I said. “Why then are we talking?” “I don’t talk to you to figure out how I feel.

It’s lazy minded of you to say you don’t believe in something that you don’t understand.

Then the button came undone, and the coat was no longer new.

A noun is a self-defeating wall, an adjective is a tenacious window.

He used to bake on weekends and on the days when he did not have much homework. He used to bake all the time, and how could we reproduce all the time? Butter and cream and honey and cinnamon and vanilla and nutmeg and clove and all the jars and bottles on his baking shelf: No one's words, Proust's included, could bring back to life their warm fragrance mixed with the scents of the winter rain of California and the wet eucalyptus leaves. You almost an invention to immortalize scents, Mr. Edison. Without that our memory is incomplete.

A mind that sees no path or direction to flee despair can be expanded nevertheless. Who can say if expansion may not one day make despair sufferable?

Is that how any person loses any person, by not understanding the treachery of words, or worse, by thinking one can conquer that with precision? Silence is the best defense and the best offense.