nicole-krauss

You__e lost in your own world, in the things that happen there, and you__e locked all the doors. Sometimes I look at you sleeping. I wake up and look at you and I feel closer to you when you__e like that, unguarded, than when you__e awake. When you__e awake you__e like someone with her eyes closed, watching a movie on the inside of your eyelids. I can__ reach you anymore. Once upon a time I could, but not now, and not for a long time.

She abandoned the garden, and the mums and asters that had trusted her to see them through to the first frost hung their waterlogged heads.

Empty teacups gathered around her and dictionary pages fell at her feet.

It's one of those unforgettable moments that happen as a child, when you discover that all along the world has been betraying you.

I was familiar with the little mating rituals of getting to know each other, of dragging out the stories from childhood, summer camp, and high school, the famous humiliations, and the adorable things you said as a child, the familial dramas__f having a portrait of yourself, all the while making yourself out to be a little brighter, a little more deep than deep down you knew you actually were. And though I hadn__ had more than three or four relationships, I already knew that each time the thrill of telling another the story of yourself wore off a little more, each time you threw yourself into it a little less, and grew more distrustful of an intimacy that always, in the end, failed to pass into true understanding.