When your heart is a husk and pain warps and wrecks you, remember this, Anna:
Remember to tell your grief so true that anyone can recognize it.
Then you won’t be alone.
I’m revising an erotic novel that I wrote shortly after my father died and it needs a title and I can’t think of one and I remembered something I wrote in the death diary, which is this (rather long) vague, desperate, poetic, sexual, fragmentary essay written (somehow!) at the same time as I was writing the erotic novel.
The words I was looking for were:
I lay here panting in a puddle of electric eternity
And then I thought, nope, Panting in a Puddle of Electric Eternity is a terrible title for an erotic novel (though maybe not a poetry book). And was back to square one.
But the novel and the death diary are both full of sex and loss and the broken things we bury in the dark while waiting to become whole again.
While waiting for the light.
And it took me too long to realize—years really, and 80 million words, and so many wrong …