By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over.
I am not sad.
As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad.
I am not sad. I am not sad.
Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, in so far as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a littler weaker, but still pumping. and by the mid afternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else.
I am not sad.
Jonathan Safran Foer
We are not idealized wild things.
We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all."
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
