5 Quotes by James Nulick

I have become an isolationist. I isolate in my room, the names of men on my tongue I can no longer pronounce, my memory of them unraveled by time. I look out my bedroom window onto the velveted backyard that expands into forever, my pigeons silent and content behind hexwire, the moon hooked in the limbs of my favorite peach tree, its purple bark the color of my lover’s skin.

I have outlived my father, a boy doesn't become a man until his father dies, and I have reached the grand climacteric, and I have built an empire of it, erasing the dead. I have become my father's son.

Things come and go, people forget. Time passes over us like a cleansing wave. The beauty of time, if there is such a thing, is that it erases everything. Only when we are erased do we become fully complete. Annihilation is completion. Nothing that was ever alive truly dies. It changes shape, becomes something else. Traces of us remain in the fragments. This is called memory.

Why was the world so ugly and unknowable?

Years later, when I had grown tired of writing, because I saw it would change nothing, I found work at a small liquor store in a desert city in California, two hours east of Los Angeles. There was a certain solace in stocking the shelves with bottles both foreign and domestic, liqueurs the color of dishwashing liquid or venomous insects, with names I couldn’t pronounce...