Cleopatra and Frankenstein

She wanted something that would roll through her like a flood, wash away whole years of her life. Those final hopeful months believing her mother was getting better. Gone. The night she met Frank, his smile, his compliments, his hand snaking its way under her dress to find a nest between her legs. Gone. Those weeks with Anders. Gone. Every man, in fact, who had burrowed his way inside her, kissed her and fucked her, come in her, on her. She wanted them out. She wanted a river heavy with men’s bodies sucked out of her. She wanted death by flood.

The thought occurred to him that if you listened hard enough in New York, you could always hear a siren. Someone, somewhere, was always getting hurt

When he finally did speak, it was a single sentence. When the darkest part of you meets the darkest part of me, it creates light.

No expectations. No preferences. If you prefer one outcome over another in life, you will likely be disappointed. I prefer nothing and am always surprised.”

the taste of loneliness is a glass of chardonnay and a turkey club sandwich at an airport bar. The shape of loneliness is his son’s single bed, which he uses on the rare nights he’s home, while his son sleeps in the master bedroom beside his wife. The beginning of loneliness was moving from Japan to Brussels when he was nine, then to Toronto at eleven, then on to Missouri, Paraguay, Switzerland … A new home every two years until he was seventeen

The wrong half. I keep repeating the phrase in my mind as we walk. I want to tell Frank that there is no wrong half, no halves at all in fact, that if there were, we’d be busy halving ourselves again and again until we got to the little square of us that was good and then we would all be free to love and be loved.

He was looking for the cracks. She had been distant since they met her father, she knew. She had not wanted him to see her sadness, which was so ugly and so old. Grief wasn’t linear, she knew, but she hated to feel the old sensations return.

. Cleo had never understood what that meant, but now the phrase returned to her like a prophesy. Two parts contentment, one part desire. It seemed a good formula for living, though one she had not mastered yet. Her mother certainly never did.

Here’s the thing. We want because we’re wanting. Both senses of the word. The lacking and the longing, all rolled into one. The more you find yourself wanting, the more you want.”

They did not yet know what he did. That you could be gifted, hardworking, tenacious, even touched by a little bit of luck, and still not succeed, or if you did, not have it last. That never to experience achievements commensurate to your talent, never to receive adequate payment for your efforts, was a terrible, demoralizing thing.