Zero K

The long soft life is what I feel I’m settling into and the only question is how deadly it will turn out to be.

it’s interesting how we find new ways, the three of us, to talk about nothing

I take frequent walks in the neighborhood, expecting to see nothing, learn nothing, but feeling an immanence, the way in which a painful loss yields a shadow presence, and in this case, on her street, I sense a possibility that I haven’t even tried to understand.

Just a family disagreement although I don’t recall now what the disagreement was. Getting rid of a nice new shirt, that’s what I recall.

I watched her dress, slowly, and decided not to give her a name. She blended better, nameless, with the room.

Ready to die does not mean willing to disappear.

Death is a tough habit to break.

“Madeline,” I said. “My mother, Madeline.”
“Now I remember, yes.”
He smiled and settled back in an attitude of fake reminiscence

The moment is there to be forgotten. This seems the ultimate point. It’s a moment never to be thought of except when it’s in the process of unfolding. Maybe this is why it doesn’t seem peculiar. It is only me. I don’t think about it. I simply live within it and then leave it behind. But not forever. Leave it behind except for now, in this particular place, where everything I’ve ever said and done and thought about is near to hand, right here, to be gathered tightly so it doesn’t disappear when I open my eyes to the second life.

“Do you think about the kind of world you’ll be returning to?”
“I think about drops of water.”
I waited.
She said, “I think about drops of water. How I used to stand in the shower and watch a drop of water edge down the inside of the sheer curtain. How I concentrated on the drop, the droplet, the orblet, and waited for it to assume new shapes as it passed across ridges and folds, with water pounding against the side of my head.