The Only Time I See The Truth

She Had Always Been A Reader… But Now She Was Obsessed. Since Her Discovery Of The Book Hoard Downstairs From Her Job, She’d Been Caught Up In One Such Collection Of People And Their Doings After The Next…the Pleasure Of This Sort Of Life – Bookish, She Supposed It Might Be Called, A Reading Life – Had Made Her Isolation Into A Rich And Even Subversive Thing. She Inhabited One Consoling Or Horrifying Persona After Another…that She Was Childless And Husbandless And Poor Meant Less Once She Picked Up A Book. Her Mistakes Disappeared Into It. She Lived With An Invented Force.

Her Mind Was Present Because She Was Always Gone. Her Hands Were Filled Because They Grasped The Meaning Of Empty. Life Was Simple. Her Husband Returned And She Served Him With Indifferent Patience This Time. When He Asked What Had Happened To Her Heat For Him, She Gestured To The West. The Sun Was Setting. The Sky Was A Body Of Fire.

Freedom, I Found Is Not Only In The Running But In The Heart, The Mind, The Hands.

The Story Comes Around, Pushing At Our Brains, And Soon We Are Trying To Ravel Back To The Beginning, Trying To Put Families Into Order And Make Sense Of Things. But We Start With One Person, And Soon Another And Another Follows, And Still Another, Until We Are Lost In The Connections.

Life Will Break You. Nobody Can Protect You From That.