A Certain Hunger

Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Love becomes describable, narratable, relatable. Over time, one love comes to lay atop another, a mother’s love, a father’s love, a lover’s love, a friend’s love, an enemy’s love. This promiscuous mixing of feelings and touches, of smiles and cries in the dark, of half-hushed pleasures and heart-cracking pain, of shared unutterable intimacies and guttural expressions, layer in embellished bricolage.

Preverbal, love is the smell of a known body, the touch of a recognized hand, the blurred face in a haze of light. Words come, and love sharpens.

Alex was a man so good he was good enough for us both, and I don’t like good people

I woke with a migraine and a burning, restive need to do something—anything—preferably violent

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for print media, and for me

It’s better to live with guilt and remorse than it is to die—just look at how many of us cheat on our partners, our taxes, our diets, our dissertations. And that’s not even with our backs pressed cold against a dead glacier wall. It’s surprisingly easy to overcome moral qualms, if you give in to the appetite

“It feels like the last decade was a dream.” He nosed closer to my heart.

He needed to die.

Once the affection is gone, I always have a hard time recollecting it; it comes to me in phantasmagoric slivers in the quicksilver small hours of the night. Once the affection is gone, it slips from my memory like the face of a dead relative

Emotional attachment is for children, and sentimentality is for great meals you’ll never eat again.