#lit excerpts

[edwardian-girl-next-door]

"Oh, darling, you will be good to me, won't you? Because we're going to have a strange life."

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)

[boymiffy]

‘She had glanced up to see that her mother was doing the same and she wanted to say, Do you think of her, do you still catch yourself listening for her footsteps, for her voice, for the sound of her breathing at night, because I do, all the time. I still think that one day I might wake and she will be there, next to me, again; there will have been some wrinkle or pleat in time and we will be back to where we were, when she was living and breathing.’

– Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell

[westindiemade]

5-0-5

I’m going back to 5-0-5.

Even if it’s a 7 hour walk. Or a f45 minute swim. With mud-soiled pants and a heart, that’s slightly crushed. With eyelids, heavy with exhaustion while my legs stumble out of the water. While my arms burn as I gasp for air.

I’m tired but tenacious. Depressed yet determined.

I’m going back to 5-0-5. It‘s not an area code nor is it the name of my favourite restaurant. It’s not a geographical location a person can pinpoint in an atlas; nor Google can come to aid. Even though it’s not the time on your watch, 5-0-5 can represent happier times.

Times when I didn’t have to adjust to the pain of someone twisting a knife in my back. Times when I didn’t crumble every time I saw you cry. It’s not a state of mind but effectively affects and manipulates my mental and emotional well-being.

5-0-5 is my pillar; my sanctuary; my home; 5-0-5 is you. The rumble of your laughter as it reverberates against my chest is my 5-0-5. The euphoria which engulfed me after losing myself in your amazing eyes. My 5-0-5 occurs during our love-making; during intense moments where our souls intertwined physically, spiritually and mentally. The sunny day after the storm.

Or the quiet moments during a hurricane.

I’m going back to 5-0-5; crawling back to you, my 5-0-5; in the form of a text message.

Or a love-letter, snuggled between the books in your bag.

Or even in the form of a bunch of post-it’s on your front door.

My efforts will possibly be done in vain but-

I am tenacious, if not tired.

Determined if not broken.

I’ll trudge; I’ll drag myself; I’ll crawl. Either way, I’m going back to 5-0-5.

Lying on your side.

Every-day I find your little ‘5-0-5′ post-it’s. Daily, I discover your smuggled love-letters in my bag and you plague me with those text messages. At first, I kept a few… then disposed the rest. You would know that because I try to dispose of them in your presence.

Subtly, I watch you. Followed your gaze when I knew that your focus was elsewhere. In my mind, it would be better like this. We would both find someone better; someone more compatible. It hurt but I was doing you a favour.

Unfortunately, you didn’t seem to get that.

Your eyes were tired, yet you tenaciously tried to unfold my feelings. Specks of depression mixed with your soft, harmonious voice, each day you pass me. Your distinct fragrance, along with everything else that surrounds you, still haunts me. A minute before the tears, I’d smile, thinking of the times, you’d lie on your side. With a smile. Quite often, you’d fall asleep in this position.

You looked so peaceful. You seemed like the epitome of innocence but we know that’s not true; based on your devilish grins in the pictures I received of you, lying on your side with a hand between your thighs?

Then there were moments when I almost killed you in bear-hugs. Unintentionally squeezing the cuteness out of you because my heart and hands couldn’t grasp the fact that you were mine. I’d almost collapse after hearing you whisper, “Baby, I’m yours.”

Skillfully, you exercised control over me, using my adoration for you as a weapon. Often I’d stop and think for a sec about the freckles which accompany your big brown eyes. They have engraved themselves behind my eyelids. A surge of warmth and anxious butterflies would course through my body. I still experience the effects of you.

Even in the midst of those terrible fights; which would cause you to wrap both hands around my neck… I still adored you.

Nonetheless, that was in the past. You are in my past. Your words have morphed into knives, which twist uncomfortably in my back because I fell below the marks when it came to your standard. We have out grown each-other and it’s time to embrace the change. As much as, I long to be in your presence, interaction with one another will only destabilise our growth.

Although never forget that you will always remain my 5-0-5… in tough times, I’ll take a 7 minute trek or 45 minute swim to you, my 5-0-5.

-Lit Loser

[edwardian-girl-next-door]

"She buried her face in his flesh. His acceptance of her, she thought, was like a tide. She had lived a life of waiting, she thought now, and the waiting had ended, the thirst for a future was not in her anymore, she was there... It was wonderfully odd."

~ Arthur Miller, "Homely Girl, A Life"

[edwardian-girl-next-door]

"a silence, the whole house like an enormous ear..."

~ Julio Cortázar, Bestiary (tr. Paul Blackburn)

[edwardian-girl-next-door]

Dorothy Strachey, Olivia: A Novel (1949)

[edwardian-girl-next-door]

~ Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (transl. by W. Blaydes)

[edwardian-girl-next-door]

"Only the living from day to day mattered, the beloved existence in the body, rich, peaceful, complete, with no beyond, no further trouble, no further complication."

- D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow