Literary Genius

I never took another picture of him.

Have you ever noticed that humans have made it so difficult and complicated to “survive” in this world? It’s a vicious cycle. You go to school, and try really hard, so that you can get into a good college, and then you try really hard at college to get a good job, and then you try really hard at your job, so you can make money. And then your kids do the same thing. And everyone just keeps on doing this and no one even stops to think WHY they’re doing it anymore. Everyone just does it because it’s what you’re supposed to do. And like, before, when the human race had just started, the goal was to just SURVIVE. People just lived. I mean, that’s what really matters, right? Survival. Because after you die, it doesn’t matter what college you went to.

Our lives our not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound by others. Past and present. And by each crime, and every kindness, we birth our future.

Hope can be a powerful force. Maybe there’s no actual magic in it, but when you know what you hope for most and hold it like a light within you, you can make things happen, almost like magic.

I want you to tell me about every person you’ve ever been in love with. Tell me why you loved them, then tell me why they loved you. Tell me about a day in your life you didn’t think you’d live through. Tell me what the word “home” means to you and tell me in a way that I’ll know your mother’s name just by the way you describe your bed room when you were 8. See, I wanna know the first time you felt the weight of hate and if that day still trembles beneath your bones. Do you prefer to play in puddles of rain or bounce in the bellies of snow? And if you were to build a snowman, would you rip two branches from a tree to build your snowman arms? Or would you leave the snowman armless for the sake of being harmless to the tree? And if you would, would you notice how that tree weeps for you because your snowman has no arms to hug you every time you kiss him on the cheek? Do you kiss your friends on the cheek? Do you sleep beside them when they’re sad, even if it makes your lover mad? Do you think that anger is a sincere emotion or just the timid motion of a fragile heart trying to beat away its pain? See, I wanna know what you think of your first name. And if you often lie awake at night and imagine your mother’s joy when she spoke it for the very first time. I want you tell me all the ways you’ve been unkind. Tell me all the ways you’ve been cruel. See, I wanna know more than what you do for a living. I wanna know how much of your life you spend just giving. And if you love yourself enough to also receive sometimes. I wanna know if you bleed sometimes through other people’s wounds.

Somewhere, far down, there was an itch in his heart, but he made it a point not to scratch it. He was afraid of what might come leaking out.

I won’t kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can’t get rid of habits.

I made orange juice from concentrate and taught her the trick of squeezing the juice of one real orange into it. It removes the taste of being frozen. She marveled at this, and I laughed and said, Life is easy. What I meant was, Life is easy when you’re here, and when you leave it will be hard again. The day felt like a birthday, our first, and we ourselves were gifts, to be opened again and again.
One thing we did was try on each other’s shoes. My shoes were almost twice as big as hers, and this seemed okay. It wasn’t just my shoes; it was my feet and all the other parts of my body, too. She held her arm against mine and it looked like an embryo next to a child. She said maybe she was still growing, and we pressed our legs against each other’s legs, and these, too, were radically different sizes, and our curiosity was blossoming like a rose, we wanted to know, we really wanted to know, all the unknowable things about each other and how we were the same and how we were different if we ever were, maybe nobody is. We wanted to strike lightning in dark waters, to see, if only for a second, the entire world that lives down there, the ten million species in amazing colours and patterns; show us life, now. We pressed our stomachs and lips together, and these too, were different sizes but my lips were roughly the same size as her ear, and her arm, when wrapped around my waist, felt long and important and warm.
We grew still and stared at each other. It seemed incredibly dangerous to look into each other’s eyes, but we were doing it. For how long can you behold another person? Before you have to think of yourself, like dipping the brush back in for more ink. For a very long time, you don’t need to get more ink, there was no reason to get anything else, because she was as good as me, she lived on earth like me, she suffered as I did. It was she who looked away, and pulled the sheet to her chin.

A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.

He saw himself in her eyes, suspended in two shining drops of bright water, himself dark and tiny, in fine detail, the lines about his mouth, everything there, as if her eyes were two miraculous bits of violet amber that might capture and hold him intact.