Neil nailing it

"This is everything I have to tell you about love: nothing.
This is everything I've learned about marriage: nothing.

Only that the world out there is complicated,
and there are beasts in the night, and delight and pain,
and the only thing that makes it okay, sometimes,
is to reach out a hand in the darkness and find another hand to squeeze,
and not to be alone.

It's not the kisses, or never just the kisses: it's what they mean.
Somebody's got your back.
Somebody knows your worst self and somehow doesn't want to rescue you
or send for the army to rescue them.

It's not two broken halves becoming one.
It's the light from a distant lighthouse bringing you both safely home
because home is wherever you are both together.
So this is everything I have to tell you about love and marriage: nothing,
like a book without pages or a forest without trees.
Because there are things you cannot know before you experience them.
Because no study can prepare you for the joys or the trials.
Because nobody else's love, nobody else's marriage, is like yours,
and it's a road you can only learn by walking it,
a dance you cannot be taught,
a song that did not exist before you began, together, to sing.

And because in the darkness you will reach out a hand,
not knowing for certain if someone else is even there.
And your hands will meet,
and then neither of you will ever need to be alone again.


And that's all I know about love."

- Neil Gaiman

Canvas

"It's strange. A lot of the time you don't register the important moments in your life as they happen. You only see that they were important when you look back. Like, that was an ending".

- Alyssa, The End of the F***ing World (2018)

Cherry Garcia

31

(...) A mostly empty wine bottle stands on the table. The bar is deserted. Sachs can’t remember when he was last this drunk, or this tense and relaxed at the same time: relaxed, because an intelligent young woman is enjoying his company; tense, because he is ready to lance the boil on his conscience. To Sachs’s wry surprise, he is attracted to Luisa Rey, and he sorely regrets they met in these circumstances. The woman and the reporter keep blurring into one another.

“Let’s change the subject,” Sachs says. “Your car, your”–he does a Hollywood SS officer accent–“ ‘Volkswagen .’ What’s its name?”

“How do you know my Beetle has a name?”

“All Beetle owners give their cars names. But please don’t tell me it’s John, George, Paul, or Ringo.”  God, Luisa Rey, you’re beautiful.

She says, “You’ll laugh.”

“I won’t.”

“You will.”

“I, Isaac Caspar Sachs, solemnly vow not to laugh.”

“You’d better not with a middle name like Caspar. It’s Garcia.”

They both shake, noiselessly, until they burst into laughter. Maybe she likes me too, maybe she’s not just doing her job.

- Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell, 2004)

Project HYDRA

28

Isaac Sachs sits hunched in the bay window of the Swannekke Hotel Bar and watches yatchs in the creamy evening blues. A beer stands untouched on the tab. (...)

Luisa wanders over to the bay window. An untouched beer sits on the table, but there's no sign of its owner, so she sits down on the warmed seat. It's the best seat in the house. She watches yatchs in the creamy evening blues.

- Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell, 2004)

Synchronicity

Because sometimes those wondrous moments that could be taken out from a Nora Ephron or a Richard Curtis film do happen.

Somebody please get me down this cloud 9 (or maybe just leave me here... Wouldn't mind at all). Hope the fall, if any, won't be beastly.