cheater.

"..The thing about your heart's desire is that your heart doesn't even know what it desires until it turns up."

"The matches were a little he loves me, he loves me not, but then I saw right on the box that I had twenty-four, which would end the game at not, so I just let the small handful sparkle and puff for a bit, each one a thrill, a tiny delicious jolt for each part I remembered, until I burned my finger and went back in still thinking of all we did together."

It's just so much easier on my brain to read books that were written after the 1800's.  For a long time, I've been stuck in this thought that if a book I'm reading isn't a classic, I'm cheating somehow.  Cheating on the Bronte sisters and Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Cheating on their poetic language and extensive vocabularies I could never hope to attain.  If I can fully comprehend a paragraph the first time I read through it, something is wrong. 

Though I still say classics are my favorite, I decided to let all of my favorite dead authors turn in their graves.  I decided to cheat.  I bought a book last night.  A book whose copyright is year 2011.  I shamelessly bought this brand new book to the world and I am in love.  The kind of in love where I stayed up well past my bed time reading it.  And even when I turned out the lights I couldn't get to sleep for at least a half hour because I was still thinking about it. 

Classics are still my favorite.  But this book (sorry, Steinbeck, sorry, Austen).  It has me.

"..Hope for little other in return than the waywardness of an April breeze; which spends its time in airy sport, and has its gusts of inexplicable passion, and is petulant in its best of moods, and chills oftener than caresses you, when you take it to your bosom; in requital of which misdemeanors, it will sometimes, of its own vague purpose, kiss your cheek with a kind of doubtful tenderness, and play gently with your hair, and then be gone about its other idle business, leaving a dreamy pleasure at your heart."
-N.H.

You would write me down to remember, 
I write you down to forget.
My eyes won't blink the way they were made to.
What falls out of my mouth
is in dramatic contrast with what I really meant.

4-8-11

"We dream in our waking moments and walk in our sleep."

I love Nathaniel Hawthorne.