in remembrance.

bye, my jack. <3

A brief service announcement from Rachel

"You acted like the guy in the after school special who takes steroids and beats up his sister."

-- RR after I wouldn't let her half-eat one of my protein bars.

and now it's at my door

and we'll just go quietly into the night.

Guess what.

i'm going to be an aunt -- er, uncle. Hooray (that's two o's, thank you).

today my pessimism got the best of me.

but that doesn't mean I'm holding on to nothing.

hope isn't that easy to let go of.

for better or worse.

From The Department of Healthy Living

the course

3 years since I fell in love with you at first sight.

2 years since I moved here for you.

1 year since I kissed you and said goodbye.

6 months since I came back to you.

3 months since I left you for the last time.

1 month since I regretted never having you.

2 weeks since I hoped for my chance.

1 week since I found out about him.

4 days since I stopped crying.

2 days since I heard that song.

1 day since I saw that picture.

12 hours since I smelled that smell.

6 hours since I tasted that taste.

3 hours since I felt nothing.

1 hour since I hated you.

30 minutes since I loved you.

15 minutes since I hated you.

10 minutes since I loved you.

5 minutes since I hated you.

2 minutes since I loved you.

1 minute since I hated you.

30 seconds since I last thought about you.

15 seconds since I last thought about you.

10 seconds since I last thought about you.

5 seconds since I last thought about you.

2 seconds since I last thought about you.

1 second since I last thought about you.

Great Paragraphs

From A History of Love, by Nicole Krauss

My heart is weak and unreliable. When I go it will be my heart. I try to burden it as little as possible. If something is going to have an impact, I direct it elsewhere. My gut for example, or my lungs, which might seize up for a moment but have never yet failed to take another breath. When I pass a mirror and catch a glimpse of myself, or I'm at the bus stop and some kids come up behind me and say, Who smells shit?--small daily humiliations--these I take, generally speaking, in my liver. Other damages I take in other places. The pancreas I reserve for being struck by all that's been lost. It's true that there's so much, and the organ is so small. But. You would be surprised how much it can take, all I feel is a quick sharp pain and then it's over. Sometimes I imagine my own autopsy. Disappointment in myself: right kidney. Disappointment of others in me: left kidney. Personal failures: kishkes. I don't mean to make it sound like I've made a science of it. It's not that well thought out. I take it where it comes. It's just that I notice certain patterns. When the clocks are turned back and the dark falls before I'm ready, this, for reasons I can't explain, I feel in my wrists. And when I wake up and my fingers are stiff, almost certainly I was dreaming of my childhood. The field where we used to play, the field in which everything was discovered and everything was possible. (We ran so hard we thought we would spit blood: to me that is the sound of childhood, heavy breathing and shoes scraping the hard earth.) Stiffness of the fingers is the dream of childhood as it's bee returned to me at the end of my life. I have to run them under the hot water, steam clouding the mirror, outside the rustle of pigeons. Yesterday I saw a man kicking a dog and I felt it behind my eyes. I don't know what to call this, a place before tears. The pain of forgetting: spine. The pain of remembering: spine. All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist: my knees, it takes half a tube of Ben-Gay and a big productions just to bend them. To everything a season, to every time I've woken only to make the mistake of believing for a moment that someone was sleeping beside me: a hemorrhoid. Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all.

If you can't say it at Christmas, when can you, eh?

"With any luck by next year
I'll be going out with one of these girls.
But for now let me say,
without hope or agenda,
just because it's Christmas
(and at christmas you tell the truth)
to me, you are perfect;
and my wasted heart will love you
until you look like this.
Merry Christmas"

Emanations on Love

Because sometimes you're so sick of trying to define it yourself, you let the poets, the musicians, the novelists, the artists do it for you:

- I want to live in a musical because all it takes is a harmony in a duet to fall in love.
Me

- When you love someone but it goes to waste. Could it be worse?
Coldplay, Fix You

- Ive looked at love from both sides now. From give and take, and still somehow
it's loves illusions I recall I really don't know love at all.
Joni Mitchell, Both Sides Now

- In your life you meet people. Some you never think about again. Some, you wonder what happened to them. There are some that you wonder if they ever think about you.And then there are some you wish you never had to think about again; but you do, you always do.

- Love is a battlefield.
Pat Benatar

- The course of true love never did run smooth.
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream Act 1, scene 1, 132–140

- There are times when I hate you, but I don’t complain cause I’ve been afraid that you would walk away.
Beyonce, Broken Hearted Girl

- The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.
Eden Ahbez

- What did my hands do before they held you?
Sylvia Plath, Three Women

- I love you for not only what you are, but what I am when I am with you.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Love Letters to her brother, Robert.

- Night after night you say you move on tomorrow, tomorrow. Now, what's holding you back? I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.
The Sounds, Night After Night

- Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.
Matt Groening.

- Baby I can see your halo. You know you're my saving grace.
Beyonce, Halo

- Take it from me cause I've found, if you leave it, somebody else is bound to find that treasure that moment of pleasure when yours it could have been.
Jimmy Buffett, Happily Every After

- I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride. So I love you because I know no other way than this..
Pablo Neruda, Sonnet XVII

- I show you my love by giving you a portion of my life that i can never get back
YaizaH

- In love you pour so much of yourself into one thing, you want it so badly and you focus on nothing but love, and you give and give, until one day you discover you can't give anymore and you're left with a bitter cynical husk.
Ryan McClean

- For where thou art, there is the world itself, and where though art not, desolation.
William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part II, Act iii, Sc.2

- I don't get many things right the first time. In fact, I am told that a lot. Now I know all the wrong turns, the stumbles and falls brought me here.
Ben Folds, The Luckiest

- Now I don't wanna beg you baby for something maybe you could never give. I'm not looking for the rest of your life I just want another chance to live.
Patty Griffin, Rain

- If you don't know what it feels like to have someone you love put a hand below your bottom rib for the first time, what chance is therefor love?
Leo Gursky, The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

- Love's an excuse to get hurt. And to hurt.
Bright Eyes, Love I Don't Have to Love.

- I've got faith in you to lose yours in me. Like you say though before you go
"I should probably be letting you go."
Buddy, 11/22