4.28.2010

feature heartbreak rec

My most ill-advised read for this day came via Twitter. It's "Sleep: Loss" by Bill Hayes.

I have been trying for more than five minutes now to summarize what this essay means to me, but I can't, and so I leave you with an excerpt:

"This is not altogether true. I would like to stay but can no more imagine falling asleep with someone else than I can falling in love again."
The last time I dared to read something that tackles picking up after a devastating loss was with Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. This is still one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever read, right up there with Winterson's Written on the Body and Niffenegger's Time Traveler's Wife, which, we all know, I only managed to finish while huddled so closely to her in bed.

I remember that time she came home from that motorcycle accident in July; I was half-asleep when the door opened and there was blood on her arms and all the while I was washing her wounds and sending her to bed I was thinking, You are no longer allowed to scare me this way, ever again.

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