feeling.

When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested on the edge of a table.

I spent my life learning to feel less.

Everyday I feel less.

Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

- excerpt from Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

~ by may on September 22, 2009.