I was thinking, when I told Hella that I had loved her, of those days before anything awful, irrevocable, had happened to me, when an affair was nothing more than an affair. Now, from this night, this coming morning, no matter how many beds I find myself in between now and my final bed, I shall never be able to have any more of those boyish, zestful affairs—which are, really, when one thinks of it, a kind of higher, or, anyway, more pretentious masturbation. People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted. If this were not so I would not be alone in this house tonight.

“Je veux m’evader—this dirty world, this dirty body. I never wish to make love again with anything more than the body.”

Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road—and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright—and it’s true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden.

Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth’s witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils. Sometimes, in the days which are coming—God grant me the grace to live them—in the glare of the grey morning, sour-mouthed, eyelids raw and red, hair tangled and damp from my stormy sleep, facing, over coffee and cigarette smoke, last night’s impenetrable, meaningless boy who will shortly rise and vanish like the smoke, I will see Giovanni again, as he was that night, so vivid, so winning, all of the light of that gloomy tunnel trapped around his head

“You think,” he persisted, “that my life is shameful because my encounters are. And they are. But you should ask yourself why they are.”
“Why are they—shameful?” I asked him.
“Because there is no affection in them, and no joy. It’s like putting an electric plug in a dead socket. Touch, but no contact. All touch, but no contact and no light.”
I asked him: “Why?”
“That you must ask yourself,” he told me, “and perhaps one day, this morning will not be ashes in your mouth.”

“You play it safe long enough,” he said, in a different tone, “and you’ll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever—like me.”

He belonged to this strange city, which did not belong to me.

A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs.

What have you done today to deserve your eyes?

But, with every barbed thought, I sensed my feet pushed down harder on the accelerator as if I were gleefully headed toward doom, as if I had caught a glimpse of Hell for the first time and needed to marvel further at its vast wealth of wonders.

“If dirty words frighten you,” said Giovanni, “I really do not know how you have managed to live so long. People are full of dirty words. The only time they do not use them, most people I mean, is when they are describing something dirty.”

And there was something so artless in this smile that I had to smile back.

“PROSPERO:
A devil, a born devil, on whose nature
Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains,
Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost;
And as with age his body uglier grows,
So his mind cankers. I will plague them all,
Even to roaring.
The Tempest, ACT IV, Scene 1”

Excerpt From
The People in the Trees: A Novel
Yanagihara, Hanya

Yet I also suspected that what I was seeing was but a part of the truth and perhaps not even the most important part; beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudenesses, was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected.

She wasn’t supposed to leave me. She wasn’t supposed to leave me. She wasn’t supposed to leave me. She wasn’t supposed to leave me. She wasn’t supposed to leave me. She wasn’t supposed to leave me. She wasn’t supposed to leave me. She wasn’t supposed to leave me. She wasn’t supposed to leave me. She wasn’t supposed to leave me. She wasn’t supposed to leave me. She wasn’t supposed to leave me. She wasn’t supposed to leave me. She wasn’t supposed to leave me. She wasn’t supposed to leave me. She wasn’t supposed to leave me. She wasn’t supposed to leave me. She wasn’t supposed to leave me. She wasn’t supposed to leave me. She wasn’t supposed to leave me. She wasn’t supposed to leave me. She wasn’t supposed to leave me. She wasn’t supposed to leave me. She wasn’t supposed to leave me.
She won’t

A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river
But then he’s still left with the river
A man takes his sadness and throws it away
but then he’s still left with his hands.

‘Bless me’ he said.
I blessed him, not really knowing what I was doing. I asked him to do the same and he did saying, ‘blessed be this woman who has loved much’ .
They were beautiful words, and we embraced again and stayed there, unable to understand how 11 minutes could carry a man and a woman so far.

He pulled me in tight and kissed me—really kissed me—one last time.

But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with that storm, that far-off boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.

He began to cry. I held him. And, while I felt his anguish entering into me, like acid in his sweat, and felt that my heart would burst for him, I also wondered, with an unwilling, unbelieving contempt, why I had ever thought him strong.