Thursday, 2 September 2021

There is no one to hear this news, nowhere to go with the unmade plan, the uncompleted thought

Christmas, the end of the year. I am dropping my keys on the table inside the door before I fully remember. There is no one to hear this news, nowhere to go with the unmade plan, the uncompleted thought. There is no one to agree, disagree, talk back. “I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense,” C. S. Lewis wrote after the death of his wife. “It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them. But now there’s an impassable frontier post across it. So many roads once; now so many cul de sacs.”

J. Didion, The year of magical thinking (2005), 194

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