You will stand in line for snacks behind good clothes on bad bodies, behind the man who is so drunk he has lost his shoes, and so belligerent no one will help him find them.
Amy HempelMrs. Linden was beautiful in spirit and in fact. Her wish, she told her daughter, was to be a beautiful woman and surprise people because she was a beautiful woman who was kind.
Amy HempelI am not quite myself, I think.
But who here is quite himself? And yet there is a way in which we are all more ourselves than ever, I suppose.
I often feel the effects of people only after they leave me.
Amy HempelThe psychic said I would have two children. This makes me shake my head. I know you are not supposed to leave a baby alone. Not even for a minute. But after a while I think, What could happen to a baby in the time it would take for me to run to the corner for a cappuccino on the go? So I do it, I run to the corner and get the cappuccino. And then I think how close the store is that is having the sale on leather gloves. Really, I think, it is only a couple of blocks. So I go to the store and buy the gloves. And it hits me--how long it has been since I have gone to a movie. A matinee! So I do that, too. I go to a movie. And when I come out of the theater it occurs to me that it has been years since I have been to Paris. Years. So I go to Paris, and come back three months later and find a skeleton in the crib.
Amy HempelAnd it was the first time that I believed the claim that you can help a person more by asking them the right question than by giving them the answer.
Amy HempelAnd what about the certainty I feel regarding you? You could say that an hour is not a lot to go on. But always, before, a thing didn't work because I was too young and too old. Too dumb and too smart. But I learn from my mistakes. The certainty I feel--it is something to hit back with. So in a manner of speaking, I now have a stick bigger than the stick I was beaten with.
Except let's not think of it as something larger of the same type. Maybe, instead of a stick, it just looks like a stick. Maybe it is really a snake. And it moves like a river. Maybe it is a river, and we can go someplace on it, someplace new.
The only time the word baby doesn't scare me is the time that it should, when it is what a man calls me.
Amy HempelIt is such a pretty story, told to me by a Cuban woman I met in a bar at the beach. She left the bar before I did; a drunken man took her place. He leaned into me and said, "I see in your dark eyes that you have suffered, and you have compassion, and I have suffered, and I have compassion, and I see in your eyes that I can say things to you--"
"My eyes are blue," I said.
Automatic is what I can manage. Isn't there enough to pay attention to OUTSIDE the car? All I want inside a car is music. When a favorite old song comes on the radio, I can never hear it past the first few notes. The song, evocative, will take me to the place and time where I first came to hear it. I'll be taken over for the length of the song, and returned when it stops, having missed it, only knowing it was there because now it ISN'T there. The same thing happens when I think about you. Although the trajectory is different--it is not the past, a past we haven't shared, but the future I am taken to by how quickly you have left.
I would like to go for a ride with you, have you take me to stand beside a river in the dark where hundreds of lightning bugs blink this code in sequence: right here, nowhere else! Right now, never again!
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