There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.

Because you can’t be as in love as we were and not have it invade your bone marrow. Our kind of love can go into remission, but it’s always waiting to return. Like the world’s sweetest cancer.

The worst feeling: when you just have to wait and prepare yourself for the lie.

I’m in a foreign land, trying to explain myself, trying to make myself known. Because isn’t that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood? He gets me. She gets me. Isn’t that the simple magic phrase?

from our book club read of the month, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

“I’ve been cooking for 21 years,” he says. “I think cooking is a team sport. All the life lessons are there. We have star players, supporting players, managers, coaches and owners. There’s practice during the day and the game at night. And there’s redemption at every opportunity. You miss a layup? You have to take 200 more layups. You overcook a piece of fish? It’s not great, but it’s not the end of the world. You get to do it again. Cooking is redemptive.”

Wylie Dufresne of WD-50

m

She was gone, and all that was left was the space you’d grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence. For a long time, it remained hollow. Years, maybe. And when at last it was filled again, you knew that the new love you felt for a woman would have been impossible without Alma. If it weren’t for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it.

nicole kraus

m

These are the most extraordinary women in the world, 

they do not go to bed at 11 p.m.
when they dance, they dance with you,
when they sing, it is the motherhood of half the world,
when they go walking, they have an affair with sunlight;
these are the women who hold men’s faces in the palm of
their hands, these are the women men go back to, because
they do not come easy and they do not come hard. These women
are poetry. They arrange for their sons and daughters the
minute they see the sun, because the sun is a beautiful thing
to sit under. To love the air is to want to fill it with lovers.

These women do not understand words like
would, likely, depending —
those are english words
that have no place in the mouths of people,
those are words made up for the language of thought,
that have forgotten to serve the language of lovers.
Those words are in a manual at the bottom of the ocean,
where strange fish gnaw upon them,
uncomprehending fish that mouth the strange words
like relationship, perhaps, except, attachment.
The most extraordinary women in the world,
above, are sunning on beaches; when they sigh,
trees far off are heard breathing in
the loveliest towns in the world.

 Pier Giorgio di Cicco

m

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.

It comes to him: growth is betrayal. There is no other route. There is no arriving somewhere without leaving somewhere.

john updike

m

As it happened, I didn’t grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I want to hear.

didion

m

It’s been so long. My life has literally been on fast-forward this entire year. I can’t seem to slow down or catch my breath.

This past month: a visitor from New Zealand, a trip to Cape Cod, a promotion. Next month: a trip to a tropical island with my very best friend, N.

m