Violet Young

Death causes all the events that come after it to be heightened, to be either worse or better than they would otherwise appear.

We choose a story and narrate all memories to the specifications of that story. Or worse: a single memory, however blurry, can start a story, can be the one random moment that sets a lifelong story in motion.

Some day I hoped we would be able to reward ourselves with these old familiar pleasures, instead of trying to forget the future and to fade, camouflaged, into the backdrop of the past.

I realize that I have been so in love with him, and so afraid of that feeling, that I was unable to actually see him, to see what was in his eyes, to imagine they could express anything good, anything serious, anything real.

We’re free, at least for a few more days, but we don’t seem to know how to let loose the way the teenagers do, the way we used to. We find it harder to lie, harder to conceal bad deeds.

Here’s a way to get over someone: live a monastic existence, appreciating the wideness of an unshared bed, and write songs or books or unclassifiable material about them until the material itself becomes more interesting than the person ever was.

Listening to the same music over and over is closing down, opening little windows of the self only to the parts of the world one likes best: bits of the past, certain people, certain feelings.

My life was a mess. It helped to hear a person confront his own mess, a row of fallen dominoes, to the backdrop of such transportive and sad music.