(no subject)
Lately I've been reading a lot of Francesca Lia Block books, mostly the Weetzie Bat series, but the book that has made the biggest impact on me is called Wasteland.
A book of incestuous love, a brother and sister struggle with their feelings for each other. Ultimately, the brother commits suicide and later on you uncover that he was adopted.
I've never read a book where I felt the love between two people as powerful as this one. Writing in a lyrically poetic type prose, Block draws the hopeless romantic out of you in this hopeless situation.
There are so many amazing quotes about love throughout the book, I decided to write them down.
I could see the veins through your skin like a map to inside you.
Then you reached out and curled your fingers around mine, so tight... That was the first time I knew I had a heart inside my body.
The wounds throb even though they're not real yet. Would you reach inside them to uncover the secret? You try to tell me but your tongue feels severed.
You were just a boy on a bed in a room, like a kaleidoscope is a tube full of bits of broken glass. But the way I saw you was pieces refracting the light, shifting into an infinite universe of flowers and rainbows and insects and planets, magical dividing cells, pictures no one else knew.
I wanted your praise because without it I felt like I was going to fade into nothing.
I smelled my perfume and it was way too sweet, I wanted to smell like you.
I know the rest is out there, but from where I sit in my head it's like being on the bottom of a not sunken pit--you can't see anything else around you no matter how hard you try.
Once my head slipped onto your shoulder while I was half asleep. I waited. You didn't try to wake me up.
Sometimes I wanted to peel away all of my skin and find a different me underneath.
We would have been good dog parents, especially you. You always fed strays and bent down to talk to the dogs you met on the street, looking straight into their eyes as if they were old friends. (Maybe they are, you said. From another life.) You liked to go to the pound and look at them. You tried to send them messages of comfort. I couldn't go because I started crying the one time I tried. All those eyes and the barks like sobs. You said that if you came back as a dog you'd find me and I could be your owner.
If you were a mermaid, you said, If you were a mermaid, I was the sea.
What did it mean for us? Because everything I did, everything that happened to me, that was what I asked myself--what does this mean for us. It meant that I was father away from you, different. It meant that if we let ourselves, we could get closer than we had ever been. Disappear into each other.
Nothing is okay, it might never be okay. I love you but I know it doesn't matter now and maybe it never will. There is nothing I can say.
I want to know what they see. And then a part of me is afraid. That if they say what I know is there it will be undeniable, it will be real.
I knew he was in love with her, in that serious way. I knew that look. It was like you become just this pair of eyes watching and wanting and the rest of you vanishing into nothing.
I had you. Right there with me. I had you living in my life and I was alive.
I felt like I was at the beginning of something, like my life was going to happen.
He tried to remember how she looked whe she smiled -- the perfect flash of it, like she was saying she loved you with her smile.
Once she was standing by her locker and her puka shells broke and scattered and she made a joke about it but he could tell she was upset. He wanted to buy her some more. He wanted to give her a million strands of little nesting polished shells, and tropical flowers and ice creams and lemonades and a pale blue surfboard to teach her to surf on and anything else she wanted. Instead he let his checkered Vans setp on one of the rolling shells and crush it.
You glanced at me out of the corner of your eye and asked if I was cold with the wind blowing in on the freeway but I said no. Sometimes when you asked things like that it was like I could feel you touching me with your hand.
If you died, I thought, I bet I'd feel it like it was happening to me.
We saw some other girls with big lace-up boots and dark eye make up... They said hi and you nodded at them. One of them gave me this look like she wanted to deck me which was weird -- actually it wasn't weird, the weird part was I kind of liked it.
You said "I can connect / Nothing with Nothing."
He had a jagged look, like every part of him would hurt. His eyes were the coldest film of ice.
It was so easy being with you at that moment. It was so easy.
She said that pain helps you see everyone else's really clearly. Or it makes you blind.
She asked if he wanted the real answer or the lie. He said real, always real...
She opened the window and put her head out and let the warm Santa Anas rush into her hair like a million wild fingers, loving her. He wished they could keep going past the Valley exit, head out to Topanga and take it west to the ocean, or circle onto the 405 and then the 10 to Santa Monica. Any way she wanted just so they could have water and sand. He would wrap her in blankets and build a fire and show her the stars because she should have stars, he though. All over her body like jewerly.
I wanted to take you in my arms like a little boy and stroke your bristly head but I knew that I could never touch you again.
You want nothing when you are trying to forget something that is everything.
She leaned over and kissed his cheek. Every hair on his body stood at attention and he felt swept into the warm wind that blasted him when she got out of the car. He was lying on the horizon--his body was the mountain and his hair was the Santa Anas and his eyes were planets.
West felt so happy at that moment. He felt like if he went out now he wouldn't even need a surfboard. He could just walk on the waves.
But it felt like they were telling each other secrets. Everything they said felt like that--whispered, tender, full of other meanings, like when you tell someone a dream or talk about your astrological signs as a code for all the things you love about each other.
Nothing happened. And everything did.
...slowly seeds are planted inside of you, one by one, by a touch or a look or a day skateboarding in a park, and they start to unfurl uncurl little green shoots and they start to burst out of old hulls shells and they start to sprout. And pretty soon there are so many of them. They are named Love and Trust and Kindness and Joy and Desire and Wonder and Spirit and Soulmate. They grow into a garden so dense and thick that it starts to invade your brain where the old things you were once told are dying. By the time this garden reaches your brain the old things are dead. They make no sense. The logic of the seeds sprouted inside of you is the only real thing.
When I called you in my heart started to pound so hard I thought it would jump out of the water like a fish. I wondered if you would catch it in your big hands... We got quiet. The garden was combing her hair and putting on her earrings. The house was full of dancing creatures, not male not female but both, two loves in one body. The books downstairs were reciting then poetry to each other, rubbing together, whispering through the leather covers. Wine was flowing through the water pipes. You had caught my leaping heart in your hand like a fish.
(That was describing the sex scene)
He knew her real smile too well by now. After all those days watching it-- trying to catch it like a butterfly.
I never looked at other boys. I tried, as I got older, to like them... I tried really hard... it seemed important that I find somebody at that point. Not somebody to fill a space. There was never a space.
Ocean hair, sky eyes, bare skin, sweat, salt. All I could think of was you.
Now he was pissed off enough to feel brave.
Open your mouth and shout out our secret to the waves. The ocean will be your voice. You won't have to carry anything alone... Stand at the edge of the water. Your voice will come back to you. Maybe. If I am silent.
I'll be inside the one who holds you. And then I won't be.
When someone is something to you, it's always that. Like a friend? You tell me. And then we knew his feelings had changed. And changed back. And I had changed and we were new, together, about each other.
I held him as tight as I could to try to take the pain into myself.
But Lex wasn't there that night. The memory of him, yes, sleeping quietly in my chest.
But for the first time the ghost was gone. It was just you. And me.
A book of incestuous love, a brother and sister struggle with their feelings for each other. Ultimately, the brother commits suicide and later on you uncover that he was adopted.
I've never read a book where I felt the love between two people as powerful as this one. Writing in a lyrically poetic type prose, Block draws the hopeless romantic out of you in this hopeless situation.
There are so many amazing quotes about love throughout the book, I decided to write them down.
I could see the veins through your skin like a map to inside you.
Then you reached out and curled your fingers around mine, so tight... That was the first time I knew I had a heart inside my body.
The wounds throb even though they're not real yet. Would you reach inside them to uncover the secret? You try to tell me but your tongue feels severed.
You were just a boy on a bed in a room, like a kaleidoscope is a tube full of bits of broken glass. But the way I saw you was pieces refracting the light, shifting into an infinite universe of flowers and rainbows and insects and planets, magical dividing cells, pictures no one else knew.
I wanted your praise because without it I felt like I was going to fade into nothing.
I smelled my perfume and it was way too sweet, I wanted to smell like you.
I know the rest is out there, but from where I sit in my head it's like being on the bottom of a not sunken pit--you can't see anything else around you no matter how hard you try.
Once my head slipped onto your shoulder while I was half asleep. I waited. You didn't try to wake me up.
Sometimes I wanted to peel away all of my skin and find a different me underneath.
We would have been good dog parents, especially you. You always fed strays and bent down to talk to the dogs you met on the street, looking straight into their eyes as if they were old friends. (Maybe they are, you said. From another life.) You liked to go to the pound and look at them. You tried to send them messages of comfort. I couldn't go because I started crying the one time I tried. All those eyes and the barks like sobs. You said that if you came back as a dog you'd find me and I could be your owner.
If you were a mermaid, you said, If you were a mermaid, I was the sea.
What did it mean for us? Because everything I did, everything that happened to me, that was what I asked myself--what does this mean for us. It meant that I was father away from you, different. It meant that if we let ourselves, we could get closer than we had ever been. Disappear into each other.
Nothing is okay, it might never be okay. I love you but I know it doesn't matter now and maybe it never will. There is nothing I can say.
I want to know what they see. And then a part of me is afraid. That if they say what I know is there it will be undeniable, it will be real.
I knew he was in love with her, in that serious way. I knew that look. It was like you become just this pair of eyes watching and wanting and the rest of you vanishing into nothing.
I had you. Right there with me. I had you living in my life and I was alive.
I felt like I was at the beginning of something, like my life was going to happen.
He tried to remember how she looked whe she smiled -- the perfect flash of it, like she was saying she loved you with her smile.
Once she was standing by her locker and her puka shells broke and scattered and she made a joke about it but he could tell she was upset. He wanted to buy her some more. He wanted to give her a million strands of little nesting polished shells, and tropical flowers and ice creams and lemonades and a pale blue surfboard to teach her to surf on and anything else she wanted. Instead he let his checkered Vans setp on one of the rolling shells and crush it.
You glanced at me out of the corner of your eye and asked if I was cold with the wind blowing in on the freeway but I said no. Sometimes when you asked things like that it was like I could feel you touching me with your hand.
If you died, I thought, I bet I'd feel it like it was happening to me.
We saw some other girls with big lace-up boots and dark eye make up... They said hi and you nodded at them. One of them gave me this look like she wanted to deck me which was weird -- actually it wasn't weird, the weird part was I kind of liked it.
You said "I can connect / Nothing with Nothing."
He had a jagged look, like every part of him would hurt. His eyes were the coldest film of ice.
It was so easy being with you at that moment. It was so easy.
She said that pain helps you see everyone else's really clearly. Or it makes you blind.
She asked if he wanted the real answer or the lie. He said real, always real...
She opened the window and put her head out and let the warm Santa Anas rush into her hair like a million wild fingers, loving her. He wished they could keep going past the Valley exit, head out to Topanga and take it west to the ocean, or circle onto the 405 and then the 10 to Santa Monica. Any way she wanted just so they could have water and sand. He would wrap her in blankets and build a fire and show her the stars because she should have stars, he though. All over her body like jewerly.
I wanted to take you in my arms like a little boy and stroke your bristly head but I knew that I could never touch you again.
You want nothing when you are trying to forget something that is everything.
She leaned over and kissed his cheek. Every hair on his body stood at attention and he felt swept into the warm wind that blasted him when she got out of the car. He was lying on the horizon--his body was the mountain and his hair was the Santa Anas and his eyes were planets.
West felt so happy at that moment. He felt like if he went out now he wouldn't even need a surfboard. He could just walk on the waves.
But it felt like they were telling each other secrets. Everything they said felt like that--whispered, tender, full of other meanings, like when you tell someone a dream or talk about your astrological signs as a code for all the things you love about each other.
Nothing happened. And everything did.
...slowly seeds are planted inside of you, one by one, by a touch or a look or a day skateboarding in a park, and they start to unfurl uncurl little green shoots and they start to burst out of old hulls shells and they start to sprout. And pretty soon there are so many of them. They are named Love and Trust and Kindness and Joy and Desire and Wonder and Spirit and Soulmate. They grow into a garden so dense and thick that it starts to invade your brain where the old things you were once told are dying. By the time this garden reaches your brain the old things are dead. They make no sense. The logic of the seeds sprouted inside of you is the only real thing.
When I called you in my heart started to pound so hard I thought it would jump out of the water like a fish. I wondered if you would catch it in your big hands... We got quiet. The garden was combing her hair and putting on her earrings. The house was full of dancing creatures, not male not female but both, two loves in one body. The books downstairs were reciting then poetry to each other, rubbing together, whispering through the leather covers. Wine was flowing through the water pipes. You had caught my leaping heart in your hand like a fish.
(That was describing the sex scene)
He knew her real smile too well by now. After all those days watching it-- trying to catch it like a butterfly.
I never looked at other boys. I tried, as I got older, to like them... I tried really hard... it seemed important that I find somebody at that point. Not somebody to fill a space. There was never a space.
Ocean hair, sky eyes, bare skin, sweat, salt. All I could think of was you.
Now he was pissed off enough to feel brave.
Open your mouth and shout out our secret to the waves. The ocean will be your voice. You won't have to carry anything alone... Stand at the edge of the water. Your voice will come back to you. Maybe. If I am silent.
I'll be inside the one who holds you. And then I won't be.
When someone is something to you, it's always that. Like a friend? You tell me. And then we knew his feelings had changed. And changed back. And I had changed and we were new, together, about each other.
I held him as tight as I could to try to take the pain into myself.
But Lex wasn't there that night. The memory of him, yes, sleeping quietly in my chest.
But for the first time the ghost was gone. It was just you. And me.