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sonistyles · 3 years ago

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Huge post - quotes I underlined whilst reading A Little Life by Hanya Yanigahara.

They were wonderful, truly wonderful, and he knew it. And what's more, he did deserve them.

"You're a coward," he said to his reflection in the bathroom mirror.

Tonight, I am a camera,

as if someone had patted away the top layer of clarity and left behind something kinder than the eye alone would see.

Not just appendages to his life but as distinct characters inhabiting their own stories;

whenever he had smiled or laughed, he had reflexively covered his mouth with his hand,

the drip of all their lives.

It was a love letter, it was a documentation, it was a saga, it was his.

Spinster librarians and cardigan fags.

"Smile, but don't tell people your name."

Recede into the evening, a melting into history as quiet as a briquette of ice sliding into a warm bath.

Motivated by a fear that if he didn't move forward, he would somehow slip back to his past, the life he had left and about which he would tell none of them.

"Ambition is my only religion."

"You're not stupid," he said, quietly. "I'm just not explaining it well enough."

They would never have demanded he be like them; they hardly wanted to be themselves.

This is enough. This is more than I hoped.

He had the ability to imagine anything.

The phrase beating its rhythm like a heartbeat, thudding through his body like a second pulse: Oh god. Oh god. Oh god.

Accepting what was told you, in turning and walking away when the door was shut in your face instead of trying to force it open again.

"Fuck!" he shouted. "Fuck, fuck, fuck!"

For hurting himself, for not letting himself be helped, for frightening and unnerving him, for making him feel so useless: for everything.

Only his rage was keeping him warm.

And he was sick with guilt.

"Fuck 'em," he said, "I'll stay here with you."

There was only misery, or fear, and the absence of misery or fear, and the latter state was all he had needed or wanted.

"Post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past."

"The post-man. Jude the Postman."

You're just looking for a reason to tell him, and then what will he think of you? Be smart. Say nothing. Have some self control.

Great ugly unmissable pleas for attention.

He could feel the smoke filling his eyes, pressing upon his eyelids like a shaggy warm beast.

It was as if the daily effort to appear normal was so great that it left energy for little else.

His days were now hours: hours without pain and hours with it,

it's going to fester inside you, and you're always going to think you're to blame.

Why had she never told him exactly how poor, how ugly, what a scrap of bloodied, muddied cloth, his life really was?

It lived on him like a thin scum of mold.

"Don't let this silence become a habit."

"Has anyone ever told you that sometimes you just need to accept things, Jude?"

Fear and hatred, fear and hatred: often, it seemed that those were the only two qualities he possessed. Fear of everyone else; hatred of himself.

He could feel the creature inside of him sit up, aware of danger but unable to escape it.

A blank, faceless prairie under whose yellow surface earthworms and beetles wriggled through the black soil, and chips of bone calcified slowly into stone.

He stopped to take a breath, aware, suddenly, that he had been talking and talking, and that the others were silent, watching him. He could feel himself flushing, could feel the old hatred fill him like dirtied water once more. "I'm sorry," he apologised. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to ramble on."

He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved.

What is going to happen to me? he asked the sea. What is happening to me?

And yet he was always prepared: It will end this month, he would tell himself. And then, at the end of that month: Next month. He won't talk to me next month.

"There's something incredibly arrogant about your stubbornness, Jude," he continued. "Your utter refusal to listen to anything that concerns your health or well-being is either a pathological case of self-destructiveness or it's a huge fuck-you to the rest of us."

He will be reminded of how trapped he is, trapped in a body he hates, with a past he hates, and how he will never be able to change either.

My life, he will think, my life.

-part chant, part curse, part reassurance-

My life.

I felt something crumble inside me, like a tower of damp sand built too high:

The impossibility of finding someone to do such a thing for another person, so unthinkingly, so gracefully!

Because finally, the moment you have been expecting, been dreading,

Ah, you tell yourself, its arrived. Here it is.

And after that, you have nothing to fear again.

And while I didn't drive him off the road, I instead drove him somewhere bleak and cold and colorless, and left him standing there, where, back where I had collected him, the landscape shimmered with color, the sky fizzed with fireworks, and he stood openmouthed in wonder.

He wished, suddenly and sharply, that he was alone.

He missed Willem intensely -

life would keep propelling him steadily forward, because for everyone who might fail him in some way, there was at least one person who never would.

"And Jude-" But he didn't, or couldn't, say anything else.

"I know," he said. "I know, Willem, I feel the same way."

"I love you," said Willem, and then he was gone before he had to respond. He never knew what to say when Willem said that to him, and yet he always longed for him to say it.

Who, really, would ever want this?

"Don't fuck this up, St. Francis," he said. "This is your chance, do you hear me?"

"I'm honored to be your weird friend."

Willem talks and talks, and he laughs as he brushes his teeth and washes his face.

He wants to hear Willem say such things over and over,

the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are - not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving -

"Don't make me go alone."

"You won't be alone. You'll be with JB and Malcolm."

"You know what I mean."

Why wasn't friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn't it even better?

It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person's most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

"For someone who claims to be such a great friend, you sure as fuck haven't been around to prove it,"

He felt he had been hustled into a game of complicity, one he had never intended to play.

I don't think happiness is for me, Jude had said at last, as if Willem had been offering him a dish he didn't want to eat. But it's for you, Willem.

He opens his eyes and experiences that strange, lovely sensation that his life is cloudless.

"You'll always be ugly, but that doesn't mean you can't be neat,"

It was impossible to explain to the healthy the logic of the sick.

To think of him as someone reliable and hardy, someone they can come to with their problems, instead of him always having to turn to them.

He wanted to devastate them; he wanted them to feel as inhuman as he did.

Forgive me, Jude. Forgive me.

Forgive me.

His silence had begun as something protective, but over the years it has transformed into something near oppressive,

"You don't need to worry about me, Willem. I'll always be fine. I'll always be able to take care of myself."

"I'm lonely," he says aloud, and the silence of the apartment absorbs the words like blood soaking into cotton.

He is so lonely that he sometimes feels it physically, a sodden clump of dirty laundry pressing against his chest. He cannot unlearn the feeling.

Not having sex: it was one of the best things about being an adult.

Could he destroy everything he's built and protected so diligently for intimacy? How much humiliation is he ready to endure?

x = x, he thinks. x = x, x = x.

I felt bad for us, then, for being so stupid.

The sort of rage that comes with the realisation of one's gross inadequacy,

Believe me, because you believed me before; you are beautiful and perfect, and I never meant what I said.

He always answered the exact same way: fine, fine, fine; no, no, no.

To collapse against him the way he never had and start crying, to confess everything to Willem and ask him to make him feel better, to tell him that he still loved him in spite of who he was.

And the two of them stood there, wrapped around each other, holding each other for a very long time.

They would see how much time he had stolen from them; they would understand what a thief he had been, how he had suckled away all their energy and attention, how he had exsangstuinated them.

The way everyone looked the same when they cried, their noses hoggy, rarely used muscles pulling their mouths in unnatural directions, into unnatural shapes.

In the same, undefinable way that he had decided to kill himself in the first place - he had decided he would work on getting better.

This is crazy, he told himself. This is not a good idea. Both were true. It would be so much easier if he didn't have these feelings at all. And so what if he did?

"There are worse life sentences."

He was home, and home was Jude. He loved him; he was meant to be with him; he would never hurt him - he trusted himself with that much. And so what was there to fear?

This, he realises, is what he wanted from a relationship all along. This is what he meant when he hoped he might someday be touched.

A strange queasy giddiness, that he is the one seeing it, that it being bestowed upon him.

-a warped curiosity? madness? pity? idiocy?-

It is as if they are bringing all the air from the room, from the apartment, from the world, into their lungs and releasing it, just the two of them, all by themselves.

"I mean, I'm actually really pissed. But. I. Am. Happy."

And this too he loved: he loved knowing that in those moments, he was making Jude happy, loved knowing that Jude wanted affection and that he was the person who was allowed to provide it.

"Oh well," he'd said, even though he could hardly speak because the pain was so intense.

Someone with whom you could discuss the mechanics of a shared existence.

As they enter the fire, they aren't burned but melted into one being, their legs and chests and arms and heads fusing into one.

Good, he'd praise himself after they'd hung up, after every time he'd kept his mouth closed against his own fears. Good job.

He was worried because to be alive was to worry.

They all - Malcolm with his houses, Willem with his girlfriends, JB with his paints, he with his razors - sought comfort, something that was theirs alone, something to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of it's minutes, it's hours, it's days.

The fact that I know this is sick means I'm not.

"No. I do this to myself so I won't hurt him. I'm doing this to spare him."

His face and body and voice and scent and touch,

the way his smile moves so slowly across his face that it reminde you of moonrise,

there will be the shirt with its dangling buttons, but the buttons will be sewn back in place.

This other person is always making a home for you,

laughing so much that you began to equate happiness with pain,

being extravagantly silly the way you never were as children.

So: happy. Yes, he was happy.

He feels massive beside Jude, something puffed and expansive.

You're mad because you can't figure out how to make him better and so you're taking it out on me. Oh god, he thinks. Oh god. Why am I doing this?

This is my little world, and I don't know what to do in it. He feels trapped, and yet how can he feel trapped when he can't even negotiate the small place he occupies?

Gobbled up this affection as a rat would a piece of molding bread.

"I am fifteen," he announced to the quiet room, and hearing himself say those words - the hopes, the fantasies, the impossibilities that only he knew lay behind them - he was sick.

The person he loved was sick, and would always be sick, and his responsibility was not to make him better but make him less sick.

"Jude St. Francis, my best friend and the love of my life, for everything."

If Willem could make him better, didn't that also mean that he could make Willem sick?

If Willem could make him into someone less difficult to regard, couldn't he also make Willem into something ugly?

He glimpsed at himself in the bathroom mirror, his stupid, pleased expression, as absurd and grotesque as a monkey dressed in expensive clothes, and would want to punch the glass with his fist.

"And for many years to come."

At one point he leans against Willem's side, from exhaustion and affection, but isn't even aware he's done so until he feels Willem move his arm and put it around him.

"I love you," he calls to them, and they shout it back at him, all of them at once, although even in their chorus, he can still distinguish each individual voice.

"You're Jude St. Francis. You are my oldest, dearest friend.

You were treated horribly. You came out on the other end. You were always you."

"And who are you?" he asks, looking at the man who is holding him, who is describing someone he doesn't recognise, someone who seems to have so much, someone who seems like such an enviable, beloved person. "Who are you?"

The man has an answer to this question as well. "I'm Willem Ragnarsson," he says. "And I will never let you go."

The Ambitious Years. The Insecure Years. The Glory Years. The Delusional Years. The Hopeful Years.

"I can do other things in life besides cry, you know," although he was no longer sure that was even true.

Life is so sad, he would think in those moments. It's so sad, and yet we all do it. We all cling to it; we all search for something to give us solace.

He ties the sleeves in front of him, which makes the shirt look like a straightjacket, but which he can pretend - if he concentrates - are Willem's arms in an embrace around him.

Dear comrade,

Dear comrade; Dear Jude Haroldovich; Dear Willem Ragnaravovich -

"You're safe, Judy, you're safe. It's over; it's over; it's over."

Now he stumbles through his days and wonders why he isn't, in fact, killing himself.

Let me get better, he asks. Let me get better or let me end it.

The cement box shrinking back around him until he is left with a space so cramped that he must fold himself into a crouch, because if he lies down, the ceiling will lower itself upon him and he will be smothered.

"Dear Jude," he makes out, "please" -

He has the sense that if he says Willem's name, then the face in the painting will turn toward him and answer; he has the sense that if he stretches his hand out and strokes the canvas, he will feel beneath his fingertips Willem's hair, his fringe of eyelashes.

It feels as if his heart is made of something oozing and cold, like ground meat, and it is being squeezed inside a fist so that chunks of it are falling, plopping to the ground near his feet.

There is Willem, imprisoned forever in a one-sided conversation. Here he is, imprisoned as well.

In his every day stands a tree, black and dying, with a single branch jutting to its right, a scarecrow's sole prosthetic, and it is from this single branch that he hangs. Above him a rain is always misting, which makes the branch slippery. But he clings to it, tired as he is, because beneath him is a hole bored into the earth so deep that he cannot see where it ends. He is petrified to let go because he will fall into the hole, but eventually he knows he will, he knows he must: he is so tired. His grasp weakens a bit, just a little bit, with every week.

"My poor Jude. My poor sweetheart."

"My sweetheart," Harold says again, and he wants him to stop; he wants him to never stop. "My baby."

For everything he might have been, for every old hurt, for every old happiness, cries for the shame and joy of finally getting to be a child, with all a child's whims and wants and insecurities, for the privilege of behaving badly and being forgiven, for the luxury of tenderness, of fondness, of being served a meal and being made to eat it, for the ability, at last, at last, of believing a parent's reassurances, of believing that to someone he is special despite all his mistakes and hatefulness, because of all his mistakes and hatefulness.

I knew I would survive, but I knew as well that survival would be a chore; I knew that forever after I would be hunting for explanations, sifting through the past to examine my mistakes.

To let him do what he wants is abhorrent to the laws of nature, to the laws of love.

See? This is why it's worth living. This is why I've been making him try.

So I tried, of course. I tried and tried.

That he died so alone is more than I can think of; that he died thinking that he owed us an apology is worse;

"Willem," I ask you, "do you feel like I do? Do you think he was happy with me?" Because he deserved happiness. We aren't guaranteed it, none of us are, but he deserved it.

It isn't only that he died, or how he died; it's what he died believing.

And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.

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