everything is illuminated

men

want to fix you
save you
or fuck you

I can’t be fixed

and I don’t care to be saved.

Never have we been so apart, 
Yet so connected by a part.

Connected by our past, 

Our time is passing fast.

On my journey of life,

You have always been my wife.

Although life is so unpredictable, 

I don’t think you’re more understandable.

I want to enjoy every moment in your presence, 

For I have lived too long in your painful absence.

Promise me eternity, 

And I’ll promise you a new reality.

Come let us explore one another, 

Like we have to no other.

Limitless love lies, 

Depthless depths dies.

Us, you, and me.

That’s all we have to be. 

There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1.

There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others.

Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million.

Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that.

There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I’m likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got.

But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?