Secret Doors

“We had never known her. They had brought us here to find that out.”
- The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides

Joy

Nirrimi Joy Akanson

You shall no longer take things second or third hand... nor look through the eyes of the dead... nor feed on spectres in books,

You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.

- Walt Whitman, Song Of Myself

Death

“You know, there is no one alive now who was grown-up when I was a child. So I, as a child, am dead. Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead—when I exist in no one’s memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that old person dies, the whole cluster dies, too, vanishes from living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Who whose death will make me truly dead?”
- Love’s Executioner: “Three Unopened letters,” Dr. Irvin D. Yalom

Talking Back

Your voice in the house
That used to be empty
Silent walls when I would
Call
Now there are lost echoes
From you