Rememberingtheoldways__

rememberingtheoldways__

Places described by a lover are like no other places on earth. To learn a city this way–boulevards curving, canals, cornices overhead–in the naked embrace, the luxury of listening while your skin is listening. The city slips into your body. And then, if you are fortunate enough to arrive there for the first time with that same lover, or more fortunate still to arrive there after so many years with the same lover–then you will enter the place as if in a dream. Your body will recognise the canals, the cornices, the curving boulevards; memory before sight. And that is a great gift, because we arrive most often as strangers; this, of course, is its own pleasure. But this other pleasure–arrival into the memory of a place you've never been and yet know in your skin–is the same as arriving into love, that knowledge of something we do not yet know. The kind of love that is like a fatality. The one you never live beyond, no matter what else befalls you.

Anne Michaels, "Held"

“I think that after the first time you give your heart away, you never get it back. The rest of your life is just you pretending that you still have a heart.”

— Tarryn Fisher, The Opportunist

Mahmoud Darwish, from The Butterfly's Burden: Poems; "A State of Siege,"

JB Lippincott 1872

lightly lilac

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