Fading

Russell Hoban, 2010

"More and more I find that life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other's arms, disappear from each other."
- Russell Conwell Hoban (February 4, 1925 – December 13, 2011) was an American expatriate writer of fantasy, science fiction, mainstream fiction, magic realism, poetry, and children's books.

And as there are slightly larger numbers of disappearances than reappearances, slowly as we age, and sometimes more rapidly than that, we perceive that we are becoming solitary. The wisest among us are even so never alone, however solitary we may be.

Fading

Thin tendrils of soul
like smoke, rising above you
in your grief, matching
the final rising
of life force from the small one
left behind the cage,
a departure's shade,
a fading found in the heat
and in the day's light.

March 12, 2010 9:49 PM

"There's a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that's a perfect zero you can go into. There's a rest point between the heart's muscle's close and open - an instant of keenest living when you're momentarily dead. You can rest there."
- Mary Karr (born January 16, 1955 in Groves, Texas) is an American poet, essayist and memoirist. She rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. She is the Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University.

Considering the harrowing stories of her Texas youth — plagued by the alcohol, drugs, violence and general mayhem she recounted in The Liars’ Club (1995) and Cherry (2000) — it is a minor miracle that Mary Karr lived to tell her tale.