User Profile

”So, the same old story, they decided not to see each other anymore. Hank felt himself fall away as the decision was served up on a sticky plate. He could see through his own body barely, the curl of a napkin through his hand on the table, and the sticky floor through his legs like he was a clear shell, something shaped in the shape of Hank, as Eddie looked up at him and slayed him all over again. He felt the last of him slip away. He will not reappear, Hank Hayride. He was dead to the woman in the diner. He was dead to her.

But there was more, as there always is when the love goes. She was haunted, naturally. Otherwise what is the point, why leave your rickety house, and why this yo-yo world giving us things and yanking them back? Hank Hayride haunted her. Naturally he haunted her, and he should haunt her, for what good are the dead if they do not haunt us, what is the point of these lives? Read instead the names of people who died before I dreamed they would, Amanda Davis, Jacques Hymans, Phil Snyder, Samy Leigh Webster-Woog with his odd and agile dancing like a very bad figure skater on the ice, read the names you think of when you are in the bed losing your own sleep, for the names don’t matter. What matters is how they haunt us, when the love has floated away and we’re alone in the diner. Over by the windows, the lonesome boy and the thirsty woman were all in a commotion in another story, and Eddie would have another one too. Perhaps she would drive a taxi, or pilot a plane, and once again feel the land shaking happy beneath her. But now Eddie just sat in the back, all the fight drained out of her, and she felt the haunting, and she sipped the bad coffee, and at last in the roar of the rain she gave up the ghost.”

“Love is hourly, too. There are stories about people who have loved someone forever after laying eyes on them for a few minutes and then nevermore, but these stories have not happened to anyone we know. No, when you love someone you spend hours and hours with them, and even the mightiest forces in the netherworld could not say whether the hours you spend increase your love or if you simply spend more hours with someone as your love increases. And when the love is over, when the diner of love seems closed from the outside, you want all those hours back, along with anything you left at the lover's house and maybe a couple of things which aren't technically yours on the grounds that you wasted a portion of your life and those hours have all gone southside. Nobody can make this better, it seems, nothing on the menu. It's like what the stewardess offers, even in first class. They come with towels, with drinks, mints, but they never say, "Here's the five hours we took from you when you flew across the country to New York to live with your boyfriend and then one day he got in a taxicab and he never came back, and also you flew back, another five hours, to San Francisco, just in time for a catastrophe." And so you sit like a spilled drink, those missing hours in you like an ache, and you hear stories that aren't true and won't bring anyone back.”

“It might sound confusing, but that's love. It is not the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs — the way things are done.”

Adverbs • Daniel Handler.