When the ship cracks in the typhoon, we cover our heads and tell ourselves that all will resolve back to normal. But we are unbelieving. This time may not be like the other times that with time grew into cheerful anecdotes. The stories we heard, about the ten thousand buried in the quake, were, after all, true.

And more irredeemable than any human catastrophe, the dinosaurs trailed across the desert to their end. They left no descendents to embellish their saga, but only the white bones and the marks in the clay for archeologists to make into footnotes. Our hour may be this hour, and our end the dinosaurs’.

So perhaps there will be no revolving back at all, and only archives, full of archetypes, like the composite photographs of movie heroines.
But with or without us, the Day itself must return, we insist, when the Joke at least sits basking in the sun, decorating her idle body with nameless red, once blood.

Philosophy, like lichens, takes centuries to grow and is always ignored in the Book of Instructions. If you can’t Take It, Get Out.

I can’t take it, so I lie on the hotel bed dissolving into chemicals whose adventure will pursue time to her extinguishment, without the slightest influence from these few years when I held them together in human passion.

Author: Elizabeth Smart