Lights Out, Sweet Dreams
Collage, Mixed Media
by Jessica J. Johnston | April 2012
There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.
— Joyce Carol Oates, A Widow’s Story
…the sad part is, that I will probably end up loving you without you for much longer than I loved you when I knew you.
Some people might find that strange.
But the truth of it is that the amount of love you feel for someone and the impact they have on you as a person, is in no way relative to the amount of time you have known them.
— Ranata Suzuki
I feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel - drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have - that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all.
Half the people can be part right all of the time, an'
Some of the people can be all right part of the time,
But all the people can't be all right all of the time.
I think Abraham Lincoln said that.
"I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours."
I said that.
— Bob Dylan, Talkin’ World War III Blues
In the years since I’d given up drinking, I’d worried I’d grown dull. Yeah, sobriety was healthier—it made you more “present,” “alive,” “in touch with your feelings”—blah, blah—we all know the benefits—believe me, I don’t need to be convinced. But sometimes, when I was having one of those 4 a.m. existential crises when your eyes snap open in a panic and you start inventorying all the deficits of your life, I worried that by giving up booze, I’d forfeited the last of whatever had made me really interesting and edgy and effervescent.
— Susan Jane Gilman, Donna Has Left the Building
“Tipsy?” She laughed an ugly laugh. “Tipsy? I hope it makes me drunk. I would like to be drunk and forget all of this.” She drank again, a slow train of warmth lighting in her veins and stealing through her body until even her finger tips tingled. What a blessed feeling, this kindly fire. It seemed to penetrate even her ice-locked heart and strength came coursing back into her body.