Words

Selected paragraphs of a novel…

Because in the look he gives me I see my self in a way that can be written.
Otherwise what would this writing be but a kind of moaning, now high, now low?
when I write about him I write about my self,

no matter what the word, through it I stretch a hand to you. In an other world I would not need words. I would appear on your doorstep. "I have come for a visit," I would say, and that would be the end of words:

I would embrace you and be embraced. But in this world, in this time, I must reach out to you in words.

So day by day I render my self into words and pack the words into the page like sweets: like sweets for my love*.
Words out of my body, drops of my self, for you to unpack in your own time, to take in, to suck, to absorb.

As they say on the bottle: old fashioned drops, drops fashioned by the old, fashioned and packed with love, the love that we have no alternative but to feel toward those to whom we give ourselves to devour or discard.

Because that is something one should never ask, to enfold one, comfort one. The comfort, the love should flow forward, not backward. That is a rule. When a person begins to plead for love every thing turns Squalid. Yet how hard it is to sever oneself from that living touch.

Something broke inside when you asked me to stop sending to you, I felt "a constriction in my throat, a welling up of tears,

Tears not of sorrow but of sadness, A light, fickle sadness: the blues, but not the dark blues: the pale blues, rather, of far skies, clear winter days. A private matter, a disturbance of the pool of the soul, which I take less trouble to hide...

J. M. Coetzee

*Edited