everything is illuminated
this is love, she thought, isn't it? when you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? more, even, than you love his presence?
the more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. it surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say 'i love you'
when i was a girl, my life was must that was always getting louder. everything moved me. a dog following a stranger. that made me feel so much. a calendar that showed the wrong month. i could have cried over it. i did. where the smoke from a chimney ended. how an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.
i spent my life learning to feel lies
every day i felt less.
is that growing old? or is it something worse?
you cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
from space, astronauts can see people making love as a tiny speck of light. not light, exactly, but a glow that could be mistaken for light--a coital radiance that takes generations to pour like honey through the darkness to the astronaut's eyes.
in about one and a half centuries--after the lovers who made the glow will have long been laid permanently on their backs--metropolises will be seen from space. they will glow all year. smaller cities will also be seen, but with great difficulty. shtetls will be virtually impossible to spot. individual couples, invisible.
... we're here, the glow will say, in one and a half centuries. WE'RE HERE, AND WE'RE ALIVE