Take What You Want And Pay For

I Am Not Good At Noticing When I'm Happy, Except In Retrospect. My Gift, Or Fatal Flaw, Is For Nostalgia. I Have Sometimes Been Accused Of Demanding Perfection, Of Rejecting Heart's Desires As Soon As I Get Close Enough That The Mysterious Impressionistic Gloss Disperses Into Plain Solid Dots, But The Truth Is Less Simplistic Than That. I Know Very Well That Perfection Is Made Up Of Frayed, Off-struck Mundanities. I Suppose You Could Say My Real Weakness Is A Kind Of Long-sightedness: Usually It Is Only At A Distance, And Much Too Late, That I Can See The Pattern.

Regardless Of The Advertising Campaigns May Tell Us, We Can't Have It All. Sacrifice Is Not An Option, Or An Anachronism; It's A Fact Of Life. We All Cut Off Our Own Limbs To Burn On Some Altar. The Crucial Thing Is To Choose An Altar That's Worth It And A Limb You Can Accept Losing. To Go Consenting To The Sacrifice.

I Can't Explain The Alchemy That Transmuted One Evening Into The Equivalent Of Years Held Lightly In Common. The Only Way I Can Put It Is That We Recognized, Too Surely Even For Surprise, That We Shared The Same Currency.

Her Forehead Was A Maze Of Anxious Little Grooves, From A Lifetime Of Wondering About Whether Everyone Within Range Was Ok.

Sometimes I Think About The Sly, Flickering Line That Separates Being Spared From Being Rejected. Sometimes I Think Of The Ancient Gods Who Demanded That Their Sacrifices Be Fearless And Without Blemish, And I Wonder Whether, Whoever Or Whatever Took Peter And Jamie Away, It Decided I Wasn't Good Enough.