8 Quotes by Sara Majka

It was silly to remember the stories of us not getting along. The melodrama of any couple breaking apart. My feelings for the man who stayed for a month in the neighboring apartment who made jewelry. He lay earrings on the bedspread and let me pick a pair. Feathers I picked and even wore. Mistaking the relief from loneliness that meeting another fragile soul can bring about, mistaking that for love, but who’s to say it wasn’t love, or what I felt for Richard, that it was love. Who’s to say.

What had I read back then, what had made me feel that way? I had a volume of Rilke and Saint Augustine and early Hemingway stories. I must have left them in the room when I moved away.

I watched women – thin, spare, alone-looking women who were older than me, always carrying parcels, bags, overstuffed leather purses. The light did something to their faces, laid them bare. As if on trains they wore the faces they had when alone.

How strange we are. How different we are from how we think we are. We fall out of love only to fall in love with a duplicate of what we’ve left, never understanding that we love what we love and that it doesn’t change.

How strange we are. How different we are from how we think we are.

What I missed most when I lost a man I loved was someone who held a record of my life from that time. It was the way we told each other things. Without them I went back to my quiet life, but with them there was a transcript of living. Transcript, of all words, as a way to describe love. But we all want, in some way, to be able to record our life, and for some reasons lovers do that for each other. Of all things. Of all jobs for them to be given.

Do you feel this way? I would ask the woman. And, if she seemed kind and gentle enough, I might have asked her if we had to continue on. How long do we do this? I would ask, thinking that, if there was a set time, it might feel possible.

I remember that I was frightened, that I was afraid of getting worse, as I had been getting better for some time. I was afraid that this life I was leading – though everything was beautiful and filled with sensation – might prove too brittle, might fall apart in ways that would surprise me.