The Sun Magazine | Les Calanques | by Melissa Febos | Issue 537
Metadata
Highlights
- imagining their thrumming as a ring of light that surrounds the building, each insect body a bright ember.
- It is a particularly crushing disappointment to realize, again, that your problem is yourself. The chasm of despair that I’d felt in New York was still with me, in me. Maybe, I thought, it was me. I considered the terrible possibility that what tormented me, what I loathed in myself, was the truest part of me — the singed and poisonous center that could never be scraped out.
- I immediately located my bag, wedged against the wall. I prodded my misery, too, to see if it was still there, and it was, transmitting its hopeless report like a TV left on overnight
- My mouth watered, and my eyes marveled, but the picturesque scenery felt doused in loneliness. Foreign beauty is of no comfort to the homesick.
- Extremity holds an allure for me that will likely never wane. I have learned to resist it in so many ways, but I am still learning. While a part of me despairs at the cautious person I’m becoming, another part rejoices. I am finally under the care of someone who is careful with me
- When people expose their innocence like that, I almost have to look away. I can’t bear to see all that sweetness, which immediately throws into relief all the ways it has been compromised.
- “No, thank you,” I always said. “I’m meeting a friend.” As they walked away, I sometimes felt a painful twinge, as if I was standing on a dark street looking up at a bright window, imagining the warmth of the lives inside.
- Sometimes I loved my fellow junkies more than I did any other people in the world. Despite the detachment of addiction, their wounds were so close to the surface. Maybe loving them was a way of loving myself when that seemed most impossible. Or maybe it was that we addicts could see in one another what no one else could. Ahmed and I couldn’t heal each other. We had no solutions. But we had found some comfort together, and that isn’t a small thing to those who would rather die than spend a whole life as they are.
- When we finally hugged goodbye, his wiry arms wrapped so fiercely around my body that it scared me a little. He let me go so fast it was almost a push, then walked away without looking back.
- In the moments after waking, when I blink in the quiet, as the tide of dreams recedes, I sense her here, like a language I can no longer speak but have not entirely forgotten. She follows me up those hills in the thin morning light and watches as I stretch my body. Together we stare out at the cliffs, and I think of that ancient time when the sea was cut off from the ocean, how low it sank, the way the rivers carved canyons to replenish it. Such beauty often requires a kind of devastation. Maybe the saddest landscapes are always the most beautiful.
- We are like cicadas, I want to tell her. When we rise from the ground, we shed our old bodies, but we don’t forget them. We call to the thing we need until it answers. Sometimes the one who answers us is a surprise. If we are lucky, we don’t die. We get to live for a while inside that new life.
- Sometimes our best efforts at self-preservation look like a kind of violence.
- I can still hear it perfectly in my mind, like the voice of the past calling to remind me that it is past.
title: “The Sun Magazine | Les Calanques | by Melissa Febos | Issue 537”
author: “thesunmagazine.org”
url: ”https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/537/les-calanques”
date: 2023-12-19
source: hypothesis
tags: media/articles
The Sun Magazine | Les Calanques | by Melissa Febos | Issue 537
Metadata
Highlights
- imagining their thrumming as a ring of light that surrounds the building, each insect body a bright ember.
- It is a particularly crushing disappointment to realize, again, that your problem is yourself. The chasm of despair that I’d felt in New York was still with me, in me. Maybe, I thought, it was me. I considered the terrible possibility that what tormented me, what I loathed in myself, was the truest part of me — the singed and poisonous center that could never be scraped out.
- I immediately located my bag, wedged against the wall. I prodded my misery, too, to see if it was still there, and it was, transmitting its hopeless report like a TV left on overnight
- My mouth watered, and my eyes marveled, but the picturesque scenery felt doused in loneliness. Foreign beauty is of no comfort to the homesick.
- Extremity holds an allure for me that will likely never wane. I have learned to resist it in so many ways, but I am still learning. While a part of me despairs at the cautious person I’m becoming, another part rejoices. I am finally under the care of someone who is careful with me
- When people expose their innocence like that, I almost have to look away. I can’t bear to see all that sweetness, which immediately throws into relief all the ways it has been compromised.
- “No, thank you,” I always said. “I’m meeting a friend.” As they walked away, I sometimes felt a painful twinge, as if I was standing on a dark street looking up at a bright window, imagining the warmth of the lives inside.
- Sometimes I loved my fellow junkies more than I did any other people in the world. Despite the detachment of addiction, their wounds were so close to the surface. Maybe loving them was a way of loving myself when that seemed most impossible. Or maybe it was that we addicts could see in one another what no one else could. Ahmed and I couldn’t heal each other. We had no solutions. But we had found some comfort together, and that isn’t a small thing to those who would rather die than spend a whole life as they are.
- When we finally hugged goodbye, his wiry arms wrapped so fiercely around my body that it scared me a little. He let me go so fast it was almost a push, then walked away without looking back.
- In the moments after waking, when I blink in the quiet, as the tide of dreams recedes, I sense her here, like a language I can no longer speak but have not entirely forgotten. She follows me up those hills in the thin morning light and watches as I stretch my body. Together we stare out at the cliffs, and I think of that ancient time when the sea was cut off from the ocean, how low it sank, the way the rivers carved canyons to replenish it. Such beauty often requires a kind of devastation. Maybe the saddest landscapes are always the most beautiful.
- We are like cicadas, I want to tell her. When we rise from the ground, we shed our old bodies, but we don’t forget them. We call to the thing we need until it answers. Sometimes the one who answers us is a surprise. If we are lucky, we don’t die. We get to live for a while inside that new life.
- Sometimes our best efforts at self-preservation look like a kind of violence.
- I can still hear it perfectly in my mind, like the voice of the past calling to remind me that it is past.