All the beautiful ways I never knew you
On all-consuming affairs, pomegranates, and poetry
Cities We Didn’t Live In, lll
Your breath as you slept in my arms
that yellow afternoon in Palo Alto—
it came out ragged, strange, a tumult of secrets
preening in your ribs.
I dared not move nor trespass
for fear of ruining all the
beautiful ways I’d never know you.
I read this beautiful vignette by
recently on pomegranates and it filled me with a kind of longing I’d forgotten I’d once been snagged upon.
The same thing happened while reading Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion, which is a 61-page … meditation? Thought experiment? on obsession, particularly the all-consuming obsession of a year-long affair with a married man.
What struck me most was how the reading experience itself mirrored an affair—it was intense, heady, lacking context, and left me feeling agitated and unsatisfied.
(That’s not a dig. The best books leave you wanting more.)
Also like an affair, the book is pure feeling, devoid of judgment, moral approbation, and even character. The man in question, A, is described as Eastern Eur…