Try this trick and spin it…

…with your feet in the air and your head on the ground
where’s my mind
way out in the water
see it swimming?

 

What happens in 2010 stays in 2010.

*

Love the world and yourself in it, move through it as though it offers no resistance, as though the world is your natural element.

I place my hands over her ears and tip her head back, and kiss her, and try to put my heart into hers, for safekeeping, in case I lose it again.

He made the boxes because he was lonely. He didn’t have anyone to love, and he made the boxes so he could love them, and so people would know that he existed, and because birds are free and the boxes are hiding places for the birds so they will feel safe, and he wanted to be free and be safe. The boxes are for him so he can be a bird.

How does it feel?
I feels exactly like one of those dreams in which you suddenly realize that you have to take a test you haven’t studied for and you aren’t wearing any clothes. And you’ve left your wallet at home.
When I am out there, in time, I am inverted, changed into a desperate version of myself. I become a thief, a vagrant, an animal who runs and hides. I startle old women and amaze children. I am a trick, an illusion of the highest order, so incredible that I am actually true.

What is more basic than the need to be known? It is the entirety of intimacy, the elixir of love, this knowing.

I’m bored with knitting. I’ve taken up arson.

I feel moderately bad about this whole thing. On the one hand, I am providing myself with urgently required survival skills. On the other hand, I’m corrupting my poor innocent little self. I sigh. Somebody’s got to do it.

absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird

There’s always world enough and time.

*

Sometimes people call me Ms. Craft. C-R-A-F-T. Can’t Remember A Fucking Thing.

Nemo Nobody aged 118: I’ve got nothing to say to you. I’m Mr. Nobody, a man who doesn’t exist.
Young journalist: Do you remember what the world was like before quasi-immortality? What was it like when humans were mortals?
Nemo Nobody aged 118: There were cars that polluded. We smoked cigarettes. We ate meat. We did everything we can’t do in this dump and it was wonderful! Most of the time nothing happened… like a French movie.
Young journalist: And, um, sexually? Before sex became obsolete.
Nemo Nobody aged 118: Ha ha, we screwed! Everybody was always screwing. We fell in love… we fell in love.

Nemo aged 9: You have to make the right choice. As long as you don’t choose, everything remains possible.

Young journalist: Everything you say is contradictory. You can’t have been in one place and another at the same time. Of all those lives, which one is the right one?
Nemo Nobody aged 118: Each of these lives is the right one! Every path is the right path. Everything could have been everything else and it will have just as much meaning.

Nemo Nobody aged 118: Before he was unable to make a choice because he didn’t know what would happen. Now that he knows what will happen, he is unable to make a choice.

Nemo age 9: In chess, it’s called Zugzwang… when the only viable move is not to move.

Elise: What are you doing today?
Nemo Nobody adult: I was thinking about taking the opportunity to wash the car.
Elise: What’s the deal with that car?
Nemo Nobody adult: What do you mean?
Elise: Why do you take such good care of that car while you leave me here all alone? What’s the problem with the car?
Nemo Nobody adult: [goes outside to set the car on fire, then goes back to Elise] There’s no more problem with the car.

*

Do you think it’s better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life?

• Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler’s Wife, Her Fearful Symmetry
• Jaco Van Dormael: Mr. Nobody [2009; drama, fantasy, romance]

~ by Joyce Hart on January 3, 2011.