You don’t need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, simply wait. Don’t even wait. Be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
~ Franz Kafka
I return perpetually to this paragraph when I am helpless and frustrated (thankfully rarely) ; it is luminescent.
“Tell me how you could say such a thing,” Naoko said, staring at the ground beneath her feet. “You’re not telling me anything I don’t know already. ‘Relax your body, and the rest of you will lighten up.’ What’s the point of saying that to me? If I relaxed my body now, I’d fall apart. I’ve always lived like this, and it’s the only way I know how to go on living. If I relaxed for a second, I’d never find my way back. I’d go to pieces, and the pieces would be blown away. Why can’t you see that? How can you talk about watching over me if you can’t see that?”
-Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami
Rummaged for colours. Quadra-hue dresses. I laid out bottles and tubes of paints in ascending spectrums, grouped colour pencils by chroma and mused the gaudy Impressionist renaissance – Matisse, Monet, Sisley, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat. Then I opened my windows and leaned into the wind, trying to catch the rain with its rainbow prisms of refracted light. It is of no use; a particularly pervasive cast of tan fills my consciousness most adamantly, a beat between sienna and ochre. It is the colour of your skin.
It’s all about the ending with you, isn’t it.
All about waning, things dying, finished, days sputtering into messy dusks.
I don’t think you can even look at winter without feeling melancholy with its inevitable end in melting fire, destruction and roses.
You even hover around me where I end; the tips of my fingers,
The corners of my mouth, where my hip bone juts out.
You are a perpetual mourner, looking always at beginnings ended,
Fading sunlight, moans drifting into soft sighs. When you let me go
I’m never certain you will ever drape your arms around me this way again.
You breathe me in as if that air, that piece of me you take inside you,
Has such a limited life.
You smell me as if I am new, as if i am bounded, complete, an island.
You weave goodbye with every breath.On the way here you were laughing with me, I prattled on
I told you stories, felt your fingers between mine.
Do you know
you have the most beautiful laugh I’ve ever heard,
the most beautiful murmur against my ear, a voice like lust, like trust, like love.
You stroked my palm with your thumb and I felt the heat of you rise into my face.
But somehow between there and here I lost you.
Long ago I gave up trying to pinpoint the phrase, word, topic, expression, name, idea, belief;
I gave up trying to find the exact semi-tone pitch my voice reaches that makes you turn away from me.– In Dialogia ; ivy blossom and libertine
i follow you around like a spy – you are beautiful, very beautiful.
there we were, sitting quietly on the edge of the world, and no one could see us.