What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

open me carefully
—written on an envelope containing a letter from Emily Dickinson to Susan Huntington Gilbert, June 11, 1852

Consent is a downward motion, I think—a leap or a fall—and whether they’ll admit it or not, even the most decisive people can find themselves unable to tell whether or not their consent was freely given.

you can only flaunt your triviality for so long before punishment is due.

And I had to have a kiss from you: To have seen your lips and not ever kissed them would have been the ruin of me . . .

He’d been told that the key to a real apology was the identification of one’s real mistake.

To you who sleep a lot because you are bored

According to Stendhal it takes about a year and a month to fall in love, all being well.

Señor Artiga and Señora Valdes were lovers with the tacit consent of his wife and her husband.

He’d warned himself not to behave like everybody else who came within ten paces of her, but once as the lokum melted away he found himself murmuring to her: I remember a dawn when my heart / got tied in a lock of your hair.

In fact she resembled a man her mother had secretly loved for years, a man her mother had never so much as spoken to until the day the tyrant decided to have his wife Eirini the First stoned for adultery. He did give her a chance, one chance. He asked her to explain why his eyesight kept telling him that his daughter was in fact the child of another man, but the woman only answered that there was no explanation.