#scott's notebook

[the-scottfitzgerald]

Lead me not into temptation—I can find it myself.

Ancient proverb.

[the-scottfitzgerald]

There is no pretending. I love you, and I will love you until I die, and if there is life after that, I'll love you then.

Cassandra Clare, City of Glass

[the-scottfitzgerald]

[ . . . ] there has been, is, and always will be only one.

[the-scottfitzgerald]

My very soul demands you: it will be satisfied, or it will take deadly vengeance on its frame.

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

[the-scottfitzgerald]

I like to have a martini— two at the very most. After three I'm under the table, after four I'm under my host.

Dorothy Parker

[the-scottfitzgerald]

There are times—certain times—when the easy affability of the gentleman he so often plays at being is stripped from the surface of him like so much peeling paint; it comes away it in tapering curls and chipping flakes like damaged silvering from the back of a mirror and what he finds when he looks through the shallow glass instead of at it is that he is a creature of furious self-entitlement and bottomless wants.

His eyes are turbulent seas and his laughter cracks like thunder and his smile is charged lightning, brief and metallic-tasting on the tongue. His heart hammers like the surf against the crag and his soul is hungry like the lick of the undertow, pulling and dragging, unseen but inescapable.

He hungers the way fire wants—all-consumingly—to swallow all things whole until the flame and its tinder are one and there is no stop or start or break to tell they were ever any different. 

He owns his possession as the phoenix owns resurrection—in violence and brilliance and self-immolating fury.

And he buries it as some widows bury their husbands—not with care but by necessity. 

In quiet and in haste.

[the-scottfitzgerald]

Shots Of Awe

[the-scottfitzgerald]

2B (Or Not To Be.)

The tenant in apartment 2B is a girl with ramshackle wings and eyes like bruises, vivid and hurting, and just the same shade of violet as those pitiable flowers in her crooked window box. He rarely gets the chance to see her, and he doesn't know her name, but she leaves her apartment door open on occasion, thrown back wide and standing open like an invitation, but to what he has no idea — none, though sometimes he wonders. She has no furniture inside, no baubles or knick knacks or pretty, personal things that might make the place less enchanting in its empty artistry. There is a mirror, though — tall and framed in old wood painted over with badly peeling gilt. And there's a piano, an upright thing that has seen better days and might need to see the business side of an axe, but which seems to be perfectly in tune. She plays it sometimes, always the same song, over and over, and the music comes seeping through the paper thin walls right into his bedroom where he lays twisted up in cold sheets, his head heavy on his single pillow. Sometimes she keeps him up with the music, other times it simply follows him into sleep like a persistant stray dog, close to his heel and content to shadow him. Some days, he finds himself humming along to some half-remembered melody he's sure he's never heard anywhere but through the walls, but which sticks to him like a burr. The humming he develops is a problem, but so much as he'd like to call it an uncomfortable one, he can't, because the nuisance is not the music, or the girl, but the strange, cool, intimate attachment he's grown to each.

Neither the girl nor the song she plays have a name.

He is content to love them both without one.