I Want To Learn To Navigate By Stars That Have Nothing To Do With Me

as if you could not enjoy love without pain.

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

I am a song about the great pain of joy.

Dagna Ślepowrońska, tr. Regina Grol

How do you capture someone who was always slipping away?

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

To live in this tragedy without raptures

Alicja Rybałko, Curriculum Vitae tr. Regina Grol

thinking about Kait Rokowski writing, "nothing ever ends poetically, it ends and we turn it into poetry. all that blood was never once beautiful. it was just red." and losing it

Make much of me why don't you.

Matthea Harvery, Not So Much Miniature As Far Away

Until I come to understand that to be saved doesn't mean to save but to survive.

Dagna Ślepowrońska, tr. Regina Grol

It's because people are so perishable. That's the thing. Because for everyone you meet there is a last moment, there will be a last moment when your hand slips from theirs, and everything ripples outward from that, the last firmness of a hand in yours that every moment after becomes a little less firm until you look down at your own hand and try to imagine just what it felt like before their hand slipped away. And you cannot. You cannot feel them. And then you cannot quite see them, there's blurry bits, like you're looking through this watery haze, and you're fighting to see, you're fighting to hold on, but they are perishing right before your eyes, and right before your eyes they are becoming that bit more ghost.

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

Look how much sadness you can make from showing sadness restrained.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book

So often a metaphor arrives in the physical world with violence.

- Heather Christle, The Crying Book