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— m.

eight p.m. by Matthew Dickman

The truth is that the default setting of the human nervous system is a kind of terrified, irritable baseline. We are wired for hypervigilance. That's why we pay so much more attention to things that threaten us than to things that comfort us. It's why we remember bad things so much better than good ones. It's why hope is a defiance of biology, a conscious decision to override the nervous system.”

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

merulae

“The French called this time of day ‘l’heure bleue.’ To the English it was ‘the gloaming.’ The very word ‘gloaming’ reverberates, echoes—the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows. During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.”

— Joan Didion, Blue Nights

serratedpens

“I heard a dark prediction rising in my own body.”

— Louise Glück, excerpt of Saint Joan (via 89words)

blubbed

solution: kill myself?

vexheart

- Evelyn Waugh, from Brideshead Revisited (1945)

havingapoemwithyou

Staying by Ali Shapiro

beingharsh

And then landscape was all there was. Curves of rock blocking

the sky like drive-in movie screens showing repeatedly films about

ribbons. Breast-shaped blood-colored towers. Beautiful, my mind

called it. I languaged it so I wouldn’t have to hear the wind. Two

weeks in a hotel off the interstate. So lonely I started getting mawkish

about other people’s fingerprints on the headboard, hawkish about

hawks. Do hawks eat roadkill? What eats hawks? I turned encyclopedia

into a verb. Ate every meal at Dick’s. Who’s Dick, I asked the waitress.

Nobody remembers the original Dick. They’d been looking to hire

a Dick but so far no applicants. I need my loneliness, I was quoted

as saying. Someone writing the narrative called me a ribbon-snipper.

I don’t have a zip code, a house, a dog, mailman, milkman, president,

dad. It’s a classic Western tableau: man wearing a hat under a derelict

sky. Not a cloud in the. In this case, a bitch wearing a fedora.

[And then landscape was all there was], Diane Seuss, frank: sonnets

acerbaa

My love, I was so wrong. Dying is the opposite of leaving. When I left my body, I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before. I am more with you than I ever could have imagined. So close you look past me when wondering where I am. It’s Ok. I know that to be human is to be farsighted. But feel me now, walking the chambers of your heart, pressing my palms to the soft walls of your living. Why did no one tell us that to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive? Ask me the altitude of heaven, and I will answer, “How tall are you?” In my back pocket is a love note with every word you wish you’d said. At night I sit ecstatic at the loom weaving forgiveness into our worldly regrets. All day I listen to the radio of your memories. Yes, I know every secret you thought too dark to tell me, and love you more for everything you feared might make me love you less. When you cry I guide your tears toward the garden of kisses I once planted on your cheek, so you know they are all perennials. Forgive me, for not being able to weep with you. One day you will understand. One day you will know why I read the poetry of your grief to those waiting to be born, and they are all the more excited. There is nothing I want for now that we are so close I open the curtain of your eyelids with my own smile every morning. I wish you could see the beauty your spirit is right now making of your pain, your deep seated fears playing musical chairs, laughing about how real they are not. My love, I want to sing it through the rafters of your bones, Dying is the opposite of leaving. I want to echo it through the corridor of your temples, I am more with you than I ever was before. Do you understand? It was me who beckoned the stranger who caught you in her arms when you forgot not to order for two at the coffee shop. It was me who was up all night gathering sunflowers into your chest the last day you feared you would never again wake up feeling lighthearted. I know it’s hard to believe, but I promise it’s the truth. I promise one day you will say it too– I can’t believe I ever thought I could lose you.

love letter from the afterlife, andrea gibson