Singing and Dancing, In the Rain…

Everything Beautiful Began After

“You remember what George said once about language, about words and sentences–like Pompei, a world intact, but abandoned. You scramble down the words like ropes, he said. You dangle from sentences. You drop from letters into pools of what happened.

Language is like drinking from one’s own reflection in still water. We only take from it what we are at that time.”
–Simon Van Booy

“Like the armies that once landed here in wooden ships, you had been prepared to invade George’s world with the endless narrative of journey.

But when you feel the lines of words poised and ready to fall in breathlike blows from you[sic] mouth, you feel only the soothing emptiness of this hot island, this ‘hollow ball of fire.’ and the words age in your mouth and turn to crumbs and then ash.

Perhaps in dreams these words will come to life again–once they are splashed with sleep.”
–Simon Van Booy

“Your life now is the appreciation of all that is good–all that is worth living for. And you embrace life and its inevitable end like hands joined in prayer.

Your stillness is no longer something to be admired–the pain of severance. A scar where something used to be.

To love again, you must not discard what has happened to you, but take from it the strength you’ll need to carry on.”
–Simon Van Booy

“Sometimes it’s all he thinks about.
But he doesn’t stop walking anymore.
He doesn’t stop to look around.
He keeps going.
He can feel the weight of their lives in a single step forward.
And he is enchanted by the beauty of small things: hot coffee, wind throught an open window, the tapping of rain, a passing bicycle, the desolation of snow on a winter’s day.”
–Simon Van Booy