It’s not you. It’s anyone. Sometimes I don’t want anyone around. Some afternoons I lie on my bed and the light comes through the shutters on the floor and I think I never want to leave my own room.
It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but...
It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it. I recognize now that there...
It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself; Nathanael We...
In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment whe...
In New Orleans the wilderness is sensed as very near, not the redemptive wilderness of the western imagination but something rank and old and malevolent, the idea of wilderness not as an escape from c...
I smooth out the snapshot and look into his face, and do and do not see my own.
I remember wishing that I could afford the house, which cost $ 1,000 a month. Someday you will, she said lazily. Someday it all comes. There in the sun on her terrace it seemed easy to believe in some...
I remember swimming (albeit nervously, for I was a nervous child, afraid of sinkholes and afraid of snakes, and perhaps that was the beginning of my error)
I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead...
I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three...
I faced myself that day with the nonplused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.
Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who h...
Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare.
Doliul e diferit. Doliul nu știe ce-i distanța. Durerea vine în valuri, paroxisme, revelații subite care-ți taie genunchii, îți iau vederea și îți tulbură curgerea zilelor.
But perhaps it is presumptuous of me to assume that they will be missing something. Perhaps in retrospect this has been a story not about Sacramento at all, but about the things we lose and the promis...
Bringing him back had been through those months my hidden focus, a magic trick. By late summer I was beginning to see this clearly. Seeing it clearly did not yet allow me to give away the clothes he w...
Always when I play back my father’s voice, Maria says, it is with a professional rasp, it goes as it lays, don’t do it the hard way. My father advised me that life itself was a crap game: it was one o...
The most beautiful things I had ever seen had all been seen from airplanes.
The contemporary trend was to treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened.