Rivka Galchen

I barely even know how I didn't feel. I didn't feel like reading a newspaper, or having a coffee, or going for a jog, or watching television. Nor did I feel like crying behind the boiler in the basement. Or like trying out for something. I did't even feel like I had lost someone I deeply loved; this was different from that. I didn't feel like going to another movie and asking for extra butter on my popcorn. I didn't feel like talking to someone who would understand.

Physics advances by accepting absurdities. Its history is one of unbelievable ideas proving to be true.

I wonder if I talk like a dead man. My daughter once came home from school very excited about some lecture -this was years ago, before I died, though just right before- and she said her English teacher had talked about what the dead sound like in Dante. This funny thing about Dante's dead, which is that they know the past, and even the future, but they don't know the present. About the present they have all these questions for Dante. And that somehow is what being alive is, to be suspended in the time. She seemed to feel that really meant something. That and also that the dead know themselves better than the living do.

They say no one reads anymore, but I find that's not the case. Prisoners read. I guess they're not given much access to computers. A felicitous injustice for me. The nicest reader letters I've receivedâ_ also the only reader letters I've receivedâ_ have come from prisoners. Maybe we're all prisoners? In our lives, our habits, our relationships?

I should at least have learned more about how it had come to be that Rema had abandoned her mother, before I asked her to marry - and hopefully not abandon - me. But I saw Rema all prismatically, all fractured and reconstituted as if seen in the valley of an unshined silver spoon and actually I'm glad love does that, I shouldn't complain about love or love's perspective - distorted or no, to feel superior to it would be wrong, as if there were some better way of seeing.

Sometimes failing is what's needed. I think it can put people in a good mood, to see someone fail. Let people entertain themselves. I think that's one of the reasons people are so lonely in this country. Because they always have to rush out and have someone else in the room entertain them. It's terrible, the loneliness here. People live in coffins...

It's important to avoid mirrors if one is unprepared to accept their daily news, and I think, in something as insignificantly devastating as appearance, denial is more socially constructive than despondency. Not that there's anything especially wrong with me--just the usual.

He is my unicorn, though... That's how I felt falling in love with him, as if I'd found a creature of myth.

I'm not one of these people who are disheartened that the universe is expanding. But as news and data breed and the crowded channels grow ever noisier, I do feel that the space is ever increasing between me and it, whatever it might be.

It's true what they say, that a baby gives you a reason to live. But also, a baby is a reason that it is not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.

Then the nurse did turn to glance, and then stare__ctually stare__t me. His look made me feel as if I was green, or whistling, or dead.