Here on Earth
Would that I did not identify with this excerpt from Here on Earth, by Alice Hoffman. Unfortunately, it speaks to me so much that I plan to incorporate the page into one of my art pieces.
You build your world around someone, and then what happens when he disappears? Where do you go--into pieces, into atoms, into the arms of another man? You go shopping, you cook dinner, you work odd hours, you make love to someone else on June nights. But you're not really there, you're someplace else where there is blue sky and a road you don't recognize. If you squint your eyes, you think you see him, in the shadows, beyond the trees. You always imagine that you see him, but he's never there. It's only his spirit, that's what's there beneath your bed when you kiss your husband, there when you send your daughter off to school. It's in your coffee cup, your bathwater, your tears. Unfinished business always comes back to haunt you, and a man who swears he'll love you forever isn't finished with you until he's done.
You build your world around someone, and then what happens when he disappears? Where do you go--into pieces, into atoms, into the arms of another man? You go shopping, you cook dinner, you work odd hours, you make love to someone else on June nights. But you're not really there, you're someplace else where there is blue sky and a road you don't recognize. If you squint your eyes, you think you see him, in the shadows, beyond the trees. You always imagine that you see him, but he's never there. It's only his spirit, that's what's there beneath your bed when you kiss your husband, there when you send your daughter off to school. It's in your coffee cup, your bathwater, your tears. Unfinished business always comes back to haunt you, and a man who swears he'll love you forever isn't finished with you until he's done.
Labels: excerpt
1 Comments:
Mmmm...interesting piece. My 'unfinished business' burst into my life in our middle age. A Tarot reader told me we were married in a previous life, and the fact that we had rediscovered each other this time around, did not mean that we should abandon our partners in this life for each other. I didn't abandon mine, but he did the dirty on his wife, many times over, and they are now divorced, while he is with his latest lady.
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