Bokelskere.no

Right after her funeral I felt the way you feel when it suddenly starts raining hard, and you look around and find no place to take shelter

Good feelings are fragile, with me love doesn't last.

[...] she perceived herself as a liquid and all her efforts were, in the end, directed only at containing herself.

I could make you, now, a detailed list of all the coverings, large and small, that I constructed to keep myself hidden

What to do then? Admit yet again that she's right? Accept that to be adult is to disappear, is to learn to hide to the point of vanishing?

How many words remain unsayable even between a couple in love, and how the risk is increased that others might say them, destroying it.

In what disorder we lived, how many fragments of ourselves were scattered, as if to live were to explode into splinters.

I am often lost in all the dimensions of time, that the past often feels nearer than the present and I often fear the future has already happened.

Love explodes near her like a war but she never admits she started it.

My boundaries were made from sand so she reckoned she could push them over, and I let her.

Pretending not to notice and pretending to forget are my special skills.

Sewing was her way of keeping things together. It pleased her to mend something that seemed beyond repair.

'You smell like the ocean', she whispered. 'Like a starfish.'

It wasn't the worst kind of pain. In a way, it was a relief.

There is never nothing beneath something that is covered.

If anthropology is the study of humankind from its beginning millions of years ago to this day, I am not very good at studying myself. I have researched aborginal culture, Mayan hieroglyphics and the corporate culture of a Japanese car manufacturer, and I have written essays on the interrnal logic of various other societies, but I haven't got a clue about my own logic.

My love for my mother is like an axe. It cuts very deep.

I wasn't capable of entrusting myself to true feelings, I didn't know how to be drawn beyond the limits [...] I stayed behind, waiting. She, on the other hand, seized things, truly wanted them, was passionate about them, played for all or nothing, and wasn't afraid of contempts, mockery, spitting, beatings. She deserved Nino, in other words, because she thought that to love him meant to try to have him, not to hope that he would want her.

Did I keep my feelings muted because I was frightened by the violence with which, in fact, in my innermost self, I wanted things, people, praise, triumphs?

For your whole life you love people and you never really know who they are.