Margaret Atwood II

War is what happens when language fails.

Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.

Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.

What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.

A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.

Nobody dies from the lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.

What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.