/urgu • “I must have loved her, I thought. She must have...

I must have loved her, I thought. She must have loved me. You think you knew who you were all your life, but you don’t. You can’t hold Paradise Lost in your head, so why should you be able to retain your entire existence to date? You forget things. You forget things. You have to. You make do with cribs. People ask you about other times in your life and you give them vague topic headings: ‘Oh, I was unhappy as a child…My twenties were very wild…We had a bad marriage.’ You have to use those precis, otherwise you would spend your life being a bore, like those people who think “How are you?” is a real question and insist on giving detailed answers. The terrible thing though, is that in the end you believe the cribs yourself. The past, in all its epic detail, gets lost. Years pass and pass until you simply don’t know anymore that you were once a boy who liked his mother enough to draw her a purple picture.

Zoe Heller, “Everything You Know’ (via lavanya)

(via lavanya)

Source: journalofanobody