maggie-nelson

238. I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.239. But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. __ove is not consolation,_ she wrote. __t is light._240. All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.

One thing they don__ tell you __out the blues when you got __m, you keep on fallin_ __ause there ain't no bottom,' sings Emmylou Harris, and she may be right. Perhaps it would help to be told that there is no bottom, save, as they say, wherever and whenever you stop digging. You have to stand there, spade in hand, cold whiskey sweat beaded on your brow, eyes misshapen and wild, some sorry-ass grave digger grown bone-tired of the trade. You have to stand there in the dirty rut you dug, alone in the darkness, in all its pulsing quiet, surrounded by the scandal of corpses.

Like many self-help books, The Deepest Blue is full of horrifyingly simplistic language and some admittedly good advice. Somehow the women in the book learn to say: That__ my depression talking. It__ not __e.__s if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.