Stay Awake

[Sabine]

kitten on the outside,
lion on the inside.

“And though she be but little, she is fierce.”
William Shakespeare, "A Midsummer Night's Dream".

[Sabine]

the blue house.

"It is night with glaring sunshine. I stand in the woods and look towards my house with its misty blue walls. As though I were recently dead and saw the house from a new angle.

It has stood for more than eighty summers. Its timber has been impregnated, four times with joy and three times with sorrow. When someone who has lived in the house dies it is repainted. The dead person paints it himself, without a brush, from the inside.

On the other side is open terrain. Formerly a garden, now wilderness. A still surf of weed, pagodas of weed, an unfurling body of text, Upanishades of weed, a Viking fleet of weed, dragon heads, lances, an empire of weed.

Above the overgrown garden flutters the shadow of a boomerang, thrown again and again. It is related to someone who lived in the house long before my time. Almost a child. An impulse issues from him, a thought, a thought of will: “create. . .draw. ..” In order to escape his destiny in time.

The house resembles a child’s drawing. A deputizing childishness which grew forth because someone prematurely renounced the charge of being a child. Open the doors, enter! Inside unrest dwells in the ceiling and peace in the walls. Above the bed there hangs an amateur painting representing a ship with seventeen sails, rough sea and a wind that the gilded frame cannot subdue.

It is always so early in here, it is before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. I am grateful for this life! And yet I miss the alternatives. All sketches wish to be real.

A motor far out on the water extends the horizon of the summer night. Both joy and sorrow swell in the magnifying glass of the dew. We do not actually know it, but we sense it: our life has a sister vessel which plies an entirely different route. While the sun burns behind the islands."
Tomas Transtromer.

[Sabine]

there is life in the dark.

[Sabine]

it's a midnight intervention.

“These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency.”
Margaret Atwood, 'Oryx and Crake'.

[Sabine]

heart wide open.

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
Anaïs Nin.

[Sabine]

old habits.

“[Books] were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually living in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear.”
Cheryl Strayed.

[Sabine]

the human condition.

“Humans connect to other humans at so basic a level that when we disconnect, our souls shatter into a thousand little pieces.”
Peter Leithart.