—THE SUN’LL COME UP TOMORROW, THERE’S A MESSAGE IN THE BOTTLE

 

 

COMMONWEALTH  (part two)    /    Ann Patchett

 

 

Half the things in this life I can’t remember and the other half I wish I could.

 

She didn’t know how to hate her mother yet, but every time she left her father crying in the airport she came that much closer to figuring it out.

 

She thought about the fact that if she were in the garage rather than the carport, she’d be killing herself now.

 

It proved to her, yet again, that a person just needed to look.

 

--“I want to carry the gun.”

--“And people in hell want ice water.”

 

“Always ask the price. That can be thee lesson of our time together.”

 

It sounded like a lot of money at the time but nothing’s a lot of money when you weigh it out against the cons.

 

Men can be surprisingly tall once they’ve been unfolded from the high bar chairs.

 

It was her loan that was forced into prostitution.

 

He was a man who had been helped out of a straight-jacket before.

 

The nuns had led her to believe that God gave preference to people who did things the hard way.

 

Caroline stopped dead, as if her mother had shot her in the neck with a blow dart tipped in neurotoxins.

 

Most of the tests you take in life, you only get one shot. Here, you get two.

 

There was no vanity in winter.

 

She understood the way he felt. She, too, had been shut out.

 

The radiator hissed and clanked like someone was beating it to death with a lead pipe down in the basement. Neither Bintou or Sayo even flinched at the noise, but it made Albie want to take his skin off.

 

Bad habits were all a matter of perspective.

 

People are scared of the wrong things.

 

Theresa was shocked by the roaming idleness of her mind, as if she were sifting through trash on the side of the freeway and was stopped, enchanted, by every foil gum wrapper.

 

“Don’t you think we should go into therapy someday?”

—I TAKE BACK WHAT I SAID, EVEN THOUGH I MEANT IT

 

 

COMMONWEALTH (part one)   /  Ann Patchett

 

 

“If there’s anything else I can fuck up today, you let me know, okay?”

 

Honestly, it was a wonderful thing to be needed by the person she most admired, to be told she was indispensable.

 

Franny and Leo didn’t talk about marriage, except sometimes sentimentally in bed, his hands spreading wide across her back, and even then, it was only to say how quickly they would have married had it not been for the future and the past. What they never spoke of was the prohibitive element in the present.

 

Franny was able to believe that the badgering came from a place of affection.

 

Their relationship was built on admiration and mutual disbelief.

 

Every page was muscle memory.

 

“Listen to me talking. I never talk like this.”

 

“Your guilt’s got nothing on my guilt. Your guilt isn’t even in the ballpark.”

 

There had been nothing in her life to equal the light of his attention.

 

And more than that, he had found her life meaningful when she could make no sense of it at all.

 

“If you don’t want to use the extra rooms, I suggest you close the doors.”

 

Franny felt a little ping, like someone had just shot her in the neck with a rubber band.

 

“No more company. Company’s the problem right now.”

 

Franny couldn’t help but believe that she had brought every discomfort she experienced down on herself.

 

If you think you’re going to find one thing that will be perfect for you, you’re going to spend your eightieth birthday reading the want ads.

 

The simple truth was that Franny couldn’t stand to be hated.

 

That was how the ball got rolling.

 

That was the moment: either Bert would hit his son, or he would not.

 

“Essentially you’re right. The kid put the nail in the tire.”

 

“It turns out a novel isn’t the worst place to hide things.”

 

She was shocked by how he had looked. Cancer really was the devil’s handshake.

 

The things you need are never there when you need them.

 

“There’s no protecting anyone. Keeping people safe is a story we tell ourselves.”

 

This was the pleasure of a long life: the way some things worked themselves out.

 

A different couple would make love now.

 

“Just participate in the fantasy, please.”

 

—YOUR WERE STONE WHITE, SO DELICATE, SO LOST IN THE DARK

 

 

JUDAS GOAT   /    Gabrielle Bates 

 

 

What does it mean to say I love you?

 

This poem must be a mess because we love each other.

 

It sounds like the heart trying to leave the chest.

 

What happens to our questions when we die?

 

I thought we could be saved at the last minute.

 

We are orphans together running the red bridge.

 

Yes, I have trouble dwelling in what’s mine.

 

“We are two roses here” is more and more of how I think.

 

We talk about how frightening this is to want.

 

You were a wonder with your bones and skin on.

 

If I describe something, anything, long enough, language will lead me back to wanting it.

 

You bristle at the obvious, but sometimes it’s helpful.

 

How can you go toward what you’re avoiding? Can’t connect, or won’t?

 

Forgive me, I am still learning how to know when a human will improve a scene.

 

Time and place are traps.

 

I look like I’m in a coffin designed for someone shorter.

 

I was raised at night.

 

Without light, every color is a past someone decided to believe in.

 

So much time passed between the kiss and the ending. I remember thinking it seemed like the applause was for our deaths.

 

This is the loneliness that turns one superstitious.

 

We spread enough distance between us to where no one would suspect we belonged to each other.

 

But instead, I will talk if I can talk about nights like this, how good it felt just to be next to him, to be the closest thing he had.

 

There is more to say, but my speaking is done with me.

—TENDER LOVE IS BLIND, IT REQUIRES A DEDICATION

 

 

CITIZEN ILLEGAL   /    Jose Olivarez

 

My therapist says I can’t make the monsters disappear no matter how much I pay her.

 

If you catch my mom in good light, it’s impossible to tell where the sun ends. 

 

So few of us had even seen Love. We had only met Love’s fucked up cousins.

 

Some of us practiced saying I love you to the mirror. That was a lie we wanted to believe.

 

Trying too hard is another way to confess.

 

Fun fact: when you to try to blend in, you can never blend in.

 

We are gathered in truth, because my therapist said it was time to stop running.

 

You don’t know what you left because you had been trying to leave so much, it’s hard to tell what you lost, what you kept, and what the price really was.

 

My monsters look almost human. My monsters want to be friends.

 

I climbed out of that skin as fast as I could, only to see some spirit give it legs. I ran and it never stopped chasing me, each new humiliation coming to life and following after me.

 

I want a joy so fake it stains my insides and never fades away.

 

I don’t trust people who don’t know the freeze of loneliness.

What is assimilation but living death?

 

I know no love without teeth and have the scars to remember.

 

Trace those scars and you have a map to my heart. Open it carefully.

 

I don’t know how love works 

but I remember the day 

my grandma died 

we talked on the phone. 

I don’t remember what you said 

or whether it helped, 

I only remember 

when I called you answered.

—EVERYTHING IS NOTHING IF YOU GOT NO ONE

 

 

“What day is it?” asked Pooh.

“Today,” said Piglet.

“Ah,” said Pooh. “My favorite day.”

 

 

“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” – Mary Oliver

 

“Be kind at least once a day—even if it’s only in your mind.” Yoko Ono

 

“Sometimes it’s harder to close the door than to open a window.” F. Stanford

 

“Rest is not idle, it is not wasteful. Sometimes rest is the most productive thing you can do for your body and soul.” Erica Layne

 

“We breathe in what the trees breathe out, and they breathe in what we breathe out. Forever overwhelmed by the beauty of mother nature’s designs.” Maggie May

 

“Nobody is going to pour truth into your brain. It’s something you have to find out for yourself.” Noam Chomsky

 

“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it. Always.” Mahatma Gandhi

 

“Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things that a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good. That honor, courage and virtues mean everything. That power and money, money and power mean nothing. That Good always triumphs over Evil. And I want you to remember this: that Love, true Love, never dies.” Robert Duvall

 

“We become what we love and who we love shapes who we become.” St. Clare of Assisi

 

“Anger is lot like shredded wheat under your dentures. If you leave it there, you get a blister. If you get it, it heals over time and you get better.” Sophia, Golden Girls

 

“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” Maggie May

 

“There is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.” Amanda Gorman

 

“Even in darkness it is possible to create light and encourage compassion.” Elie Weisel

 

“Do the best you can, until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.” Maya Angelou

—I CAN SEE THAT YOU ARE LONESOME JUST LIKE ME

 

Go Out for a Walk 

Find meaning. 

Distinguish melancholy 

from sadness. 

Go out for a walk. 

It doesn’t have to be a 

romantic walk in the park, 

spring at its most 

spectacular moment, 

flowers and smells 

and outstanding poetical 

imagery smoothly transferring

you into another world. 

It doesn’t have to be a walk 

during which you’ll have 

multiple life epiphanies 

and discover meanings 

no other brain ever managed 

to encounter. 

Do not be afraid of spending 

quality time by yourself. 

Find meaning 

or don’t find meaning 

but 'steal' some time and 

give it freely and exclusively 

to your own self. 

Opt for privacy and solitude. 

That doesn’t make you antisocial 

or cause you to reject the 

rest of the world. 

But you need to breathe. 

And you need to be.

 

--Albert Camus

 —EVERYBODY TALKS, EVEN IF NO ONE LISTENS

 

 

THE INNER VOICE OF LOVE   /    Henri J. M. Nouwen

 

 

To my surprise, I never lost the ability to write. In fact, writing became a part of my struggle for survival. It gave me the little distance from myself that I needed to keep from drowning in my despair.

 

Within me, there was one long scream coming from a place I didn’t know existed, a place full of demons.

 

I became possessive, needy, and dependent, and when the friendship finally had to be interrupted, I fell apart. I felt abandoned, rejected, and betrayed. Indeed, the extremes touched each other.

 

I knew that I had been set on a road where nobody could walk with me.

 

When I returned, I reread all I had written during the time of my “exile.” It seemed so intense and raw that I could hardly imagine it would speak to anyone but me.

 

There is a deep hole in your being, like an abyss. You will never succeed in filling that hole, because you are inexhaustible. You have to work around it, so that gradually the abyss closes.

Since the hole is so enormous and your anguish so deep, you will always be tempted to flee from it. There are two extremes to avoid: being completely absorbed in your pain and being distracted by many things that you stay far away from the wound you want to heal.

 

Do not tell everyone your story. You will only end up feeling more rejected. People cannot give you what you long for in your heart. The more you expect from people’s response to your experience of abandonment, the more you feel exposed to ridicule.   

 

No one person can fulfill all your needs.

 

As long as you can live amid your emotions, passions, and feelings, you will continue to experience loneliness, jealousy, anger, resentment, and even rage, because those are the most obvious responses to rejection and abandonment. 

 

When others stop loving you, you do not have to stop loving them.

 

One day you will be free to give gratuitous love, a love that does not ask for anything in return. 

 

Increasingly, you have come to see your body as an enemy that has to be conquered.

 

Trust is so hard, since you have nothing to fall back on. Still, trust is what is essential.

 

You have to live through your pain gradually and thus deprive it of its power over you.

 

When you keep reliving painful events of the past, you can feel victimized by them.

 

Your inexhaustible need for affection is an addition. It rules your life and makes you a victim.

 

Whenever you feel lonely, you must try to find the source of this feeling. You are inclined either to run away from your loneliness or to dwell in it. When you run away from it, your loneliness does not really diminish; you simply force it out of your mind temporarily. When you start dwelling in it, your feelings only become stronger, and you slip into deep depression 

 

Simply start by admitting that you cannot cure yourself.

 

Look at Rembrandt and van Gogh. They trusted their vocations and did not allow anyone to lead them astray. They didn’t bend over backward to please their friends or enemies. Both led their lives in poverty, but both left humanity with gifts that could heal the minds and hearts of many generations. Think of those two men and trust that you, too, have a unique vocation that is worth claiming and living out faithfully.

 

What is your pain? Is it the experience of not receiving what you most need? Is it the place of emptiness where you feel sharply the absence of the thing you most desire?

 

But there is another way. You can tell your story from the place where it no longer dominates you. You can speak about it with a certain distance and see it as the way to your present freedom.

 

When suddenly, you seem to lose all you thought you had gained, do not despair. Healing is not a straight line. You must expect setbacks and regressions. Don’t say to yourself, “All is lost. I have to start over again.” This is not true. What you have gained, you have gained. 

 —LOVE CAN’T HELP ITSELF

 

 

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie

 

 

The trembling was a message from the future.

 

That’s part of the deal: I fall. Gravity is real.

 

Speaking one word is like speaking three sentences and carrying three thousand pounds.

 

You lose the game. You don’t win this.

 

But I’m a cockroach, and you can’t kill me.

 

If there is one great irony in my life, it is that I couldn’t literally be still until I couldn’t be anything other than unstill.

 

I always relied on my ability to run away from any potential bully.

 

Growing up, I always knew it was fight or laugh, so to make a big guy laugh was the safe way to go.

 

I just wanted to keep my head below water. I needed to suffer. I needed to go as low as I could go.

 

I realized I could no longer escape myself and Parkinson’s, otherwise it was like having a knife fight in a closet. 

 

You can't pretend, at home, that you don't have Parkinson's, because you're just there with it. But if I'm out in the world, and I'm dealing with other people, and they don't know I have it, then I don't have it.

 

I broke this shoulder — had it replaced. I broke this elbow. I broke this hand. I had an infection that almost cost me this finger. I broke my face. I broke this humorous. I’ve pretty much broke everything so far. 

 

We—Tracy and I—give each other space to make mistakes. Always remember that. Don't perceive slights that aren’t there.

 

We didn't have a lot of money. I was dumpster diving because I knew the grocery store would throw baked goods out. We'd steal jam and peanut butter from the IHOP or Denny's. It was a tough existence. But in a relatively short period of time I was famous and I was the biggest movie star in the world... It was crazy. It made no sense.

 

Laughing is always my first response to anything. It's just looking for joy in things.

 

The thing I think my legacy is, and I'm really grateful for, is the fact that there's a woman from 25 years ago who couldn't go shopping because she couldn't speak properly, and she couldn't find change in her purse, and she was afraid people would think bad things about her, like she was drunk and that kind of stigma. [I get to] take that pressure off people. They say, "He has it. I know him. I know that you're going through [this].” That's huge.

 

I’m still happy to join the day and be a part of things. I enjoy the little math problems of existence. I love waking up and figuring that stuff out and at the same time being with my family. My problem is I fall down. I trip over things and fall down and break things. And that’s part of having this. But I hope that, and I feel that, I won’t break as many bones tomorrow. So that’s being optimistic.

 

No matter how much I sit here and talk to you about how I've philosophically accepted it and taken its weight, Parkinson's is still kicking my ass. I won't win at this. I will lose. But, there's plenty to be gained in the loss.

 

“The only thing he ever asked of me was no violins. He didn’t want to make a pitiful, maudlin movie about a person with a condition.” Davis Guggenheim

—LET’S KEEP IT GOLD. WE DON’T EVER HAVE TO GROW OLD

 

 

PROMISES OF GOLD   /    JOSE OLIVAREZ

 

When you put your hand on my thigh, it was like I knew for the first time why god gave us thighs. Why god gave us hands. Maybe god invented yellow for the cabs, so the first time we touched like this it could be accented in gold.

 

How many bad lovers have gotten poems?

 

Poetry is not therapy, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t try.

 

I’m the child of loss and the inheritor of losing.

 

Do you understand what I’m saying? I’ll never close the distance.

 

I want to live in the unknowing where everything is possible.

 

Perspective is a magic trick.

 

Perhaps all of our love was doomed from the start

 

Maybe more is the start of all ruination stories.

 

This is how we learned to be boys: we kept everything we loved close by and out of sight.

 

My dad rarely said love, but he always left the bar.

 

Jeff said the secret to smoking was to hold the smoke in your mouth and never your lungs.

 

It’s like the truth, it’s just an idea, it’s physical, like you can choose not to believe in gravity, but it’s still going to hold you down.

 

I wanted to believe that brutality had a point. I needed to believe suffering was honorable.

 

I want to learn what the birds know—to love a home when it is abundant and to leave when the love stops. 

 

I go up and up, but end up downer than down.

 

What’s it called? When the mirror looks uglier than the tv?

 

I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to accept joy?

 

We were too poor to want what we wanted.

 

dear god, I’ll never understand 

how some people meet 

a drowning person & offer

 INSPIRATIONAL advice 

instead of offering a hand 

or a rope. 

 

If we were better at being honest, maybe it wouldn’t take a bottle of something strong to make us talk straight.

 

Do the stars only talk to women?

 

Who in your life teaches you how to say yes to your well-being and, by extension, your joy?

 

I’ve lived long enough to know sadness leave & returns & leaves again.

 

All my love misfits into a basement where I promise the door is always open.

 

The most Mexican thing about me

Is I drink with men

Who don’t say anything

About how they’re feeling

Until we’re drunk & almost crying 

 

Out here, we wear the fuck out of our common feathers

 

My work: to write poems that make my people feel safe, seen, or otherwise loved.

 

Those microwave days, I clung to hunger, hunger like clay—I molded it.

 

What’s dead returns always uglier.

 

Winter is long and humans aren’t the only creatures that suffer from loneliness.

 

A lover once called me beautiful & kissed me so gently you could plant seeds. We used to sit by the ocean & talk until the water was clear enough to see our true selves.

 

I keep writing poems that begin with the wilting.

That live in the wilting.

Erasing the bloom.

 

The law of physics requires us to love more, celebrate louder.

 

what was it that I desired? for the pain to dissolve like sugar? for someone else to hold my hand? for the burden of loving me to be given to someone else?   

 

Poetry is communal. I might start the poem, but you finish it.

 —NO ONE ELSE CAN MAKE ME FEEL THE COLORS THAT YOU BRING

 

 

…Tomorrow, very early, I’m flying to see my best friend on the planet. Am I excited? Hell yeah. 

I feel so grateful to have a friend like that, and I hope you have one, too.

 

…“What can you do today to take exquisite care of yourself?” Nikki Lundberg

 

…“Worry, and the accompanying anxiety, will not add anything to your life.” That’s from Bible Study and it’s very true, but the question is: How to make it stop?

 

…“I drink, therefore I am. I think, therefore I drink.” Lori Gomez

 

…“I think books are like people, in the sense that they’ll turn up in your life when you most need them. After my father died, the book that sort of saved my life was Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Because of that experience, I firmly believe there are books whose greatness actually enables you to live, to do something. And sometimes, human beings need story and narrative more than they need nourishment and food.”—Emma Thompson 

 

…“When you're feeling blue, sometimes the best thing you can do is try to make it beautiful.” Diana Olney

 

…“At night I think of my piano in its ocean grave, and sometimes of myself floating above it.” Jane Campion, “The Piano”

 

…“I’ve been so good this week about ironing my silk pajamas every night before bed.” Steven Dunn

 

…“I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn't trying to make a sentence—I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.”  Ocean Vuong

 

…“You will experience sitting in a theatre or a cinema or in your library reading and you'll wonder what on earth has happened to your idol, your mentor, your inspiration. Be kind. We are all dissipating together, and we will all, with God's grace, get better together." John Gielgud

 

…“At some point you must know that you are the shit. You must believe this, even if you forget it. There is no one who can do what you do, how you do it, on the face of this earth. You are a singularly unique creation in the history of humanity.

I don’t always remember this about myself, but I know it to be true. I know my worth even when I struggle with self-worth. Deep down, I know exactly who I am. I hope you do, too.” Said Shayie