Lonely People Are Always Up In The

He Learned To Live With The Truth. Not To Accept It, But To Live With It. It Was Like Living With An Elephant. His Room Was Tiny, And Every Morning He Had To Squeeze Around The Truth Just To Get To The Bathroom. To Reach The Armoire To Get A Pair Of Underpants He Had To Crawl Under The Truth, Praying It Wouldn't Choose That Moment To Sit On His Face. At Night, When He Closed His Eyes, He Felt It Looming Above Him.

I Want To Say Somewhere: I've Tried To Be Forgiving. And Yet. There Were Times In My Life, Whole Years, When Anger Got The Better Of Me. Ugliness Turned Me Inside Out. There Was A Certain Satisfaction In Bitterness. I Courted It. It Was Standing Outside, And I Invited It In.

I Smiled Back, The Importance Of Manners, My Mother Always Said, Is Inversely Related To How Inclined One Is To Use Them, Or, In Other Words, Sometimes Politeness Is All That Stands Between Oneself And Madness.

She Was Gone, And All That Was Left Was The Space You'd Grown Around Her, Like A Tree That Grows Around A Fence. For A Long Time, It Remained Hollow. Years, Maybe. And When At Last It Was Filled Again, You Knew That The New Love You Felt For A Woman Would Have Been Impossible Without Alma. If It Weren't For Her, There Would Never Have Been An Empty Space, Or The Need To Fill It.

A Couple Months After My Heart Attack, Fifty-seven Years After I'd Given It Up, I Started To Write Again. I Did It For Myself Alone, Not For Anyone Else, And That Was The Difference. It Didn't Matter If I Found The Words, And More Than That, I Knew It Would Be Impossible To Find The Right Ones.