verbava все записи автора David Gilmour – Sparrow Nights

But travel is never the escape one imagines. Quite the reverse, actually. By changing the landscape, one succeeds only in highlighting the familiar—in my case, a broken heart.

***

Sometimes, after going to bed with Emma Carpenter, I wanted to cal for an exorcist.

***

If there was a moment when devil whispered into my ear, “It’s over,” it was then. It was as if she had gone to sleep and woken up speaking a foreign language, a language I had no access to.

***

“I am leaning in the direction of not being in love with you any more.”

***

Movies are not for the heartbroken, I had forgotten that. The eyes rest on the vivid images, but instead of being absorbed by them, they use the screen as a sort of trampoline for private, painful imaginings. The stillness in the theatre, the privacy that comes from being in the dark give rise to a focused torture.

***

That’s the great illusion of travel, of course, the notion that there’s somewhere to get to. A place where you can finally say, Ah, I’ve arrived. (Of course there is no such place. There’s only a succession of waitings until you go home.)

***

“But you like younger women?”
“I have to, really. The ones of my age are all dead.”

***

I felt, for the next hour or so anyway, free not just from desire, but, more important, from the worry that the desire would not be fulfilled.

***

We consumed a number of bottles of wine, after which the conversation turned, of course, to women. It still strikes me as curious that men talk of virtually nothing else.

***

What happens to those bad moments? Does sex wipe them away, like that damp cloth on the blackboard? Or do they remain in the heart, one added upon another, a tiff over the dishes here, a disagreement about bullfight there, an accumulation of nicks and cuts until one morning she looks across the breakfast table and, like Anna Karenina, finds your ears too large or the crunching of your toast repulsive?

***

What a curious thought, that sex, this thing that had always struck me as the heart of the matter, might be only a way of clearing your head, rather like clearing a table, so that you could get down to the real business of life.

***

One spends one’s life preparing for tragedies that never happen; the real shockers, I now understand, the real knifings, always come at close range.

***

“Uh?” he said, widening his eyes, as if he had perhaps me and was giving me the benefit of the doubt.
I repeated the question, my tone implying, I know you’re a moron, so I’ll go slowly.

***

But she left, you see, and, well, quite simply, I seem to be a chap who loves women who leave. Quod est demonstratum. It is their absolute, unmitigated, schizophrenic unavailability that makes them so precious. Indeed, who could be more desirable than an ex-lover crossing the street with a new man?

***

Really, how much of one’s life is made up of these private incidents; how submerged one is. You know, for example, that you will recover from a broken heart, but somehow that piece of information, that factoid, never arrives at the soul or the brain or the nervous system, yes, the nervous system, where it might do some good. But if you know you’re going to be all right, why then do you suffer so? To get there. To get where you know you are going to get to anyway. How pathetic, then, to feel about having arrived. I survived, you say. Yes, but what else would you do? No one dies from love. Come, come.

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