The measure of mindfulness, the touchstone for sanity in this society, is our level of productivity, our attention to responsibility, our ability to plain and simple hold down a job.
homesickness is just a state of mind for me. i’m always missing someone or someplace or something, i’m always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere. my life has been one long longing.
It didn’t and doesn’t turn out well. There is no happy ending to the story of sorrow if you are born with a predilection for despair. The world is, after all, a coarse and brutal and cruel place. It’s only a matter of how long you can live with it.
It’s being a grown up, which I never figured out how to do, scrubbing the tub, and remembering to eat and shampoo my hair. It’s the basics: I can write a whole book, but I cannot handle the basics.
Am I worried people will say I’m repeating myself? Sure. One thought I had was to publish it as a novel but eventually I just decided to do what I wanted to do.
And she keeps saying, how can you do this to me? And i want to scream, what do you mean, how can I do this to you? Aren’t we confusing our pronouns here? The question, really, is How could I do this to myself?
I sit there in my bed staring at the wall, feeling happy, enjoying the way the wall looks, how pink and how white it is. Pink and white, as far as I’m concerned, have never looked quite so pink and white before.
But just as a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, a little bit of energy, in the hands of someone hell-bent on suicide, is a very dangerous thing.
