Quotes from Gail Caldwell

Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance does us part--time and space and the heart's weariness are the blander executioners of human connection.

This was one of the dynamics between us we came to value: She was the good girl and I was the rebel, and each of us learned enough from the other to expand our respective territories.

Caroline and I had reached out to each other from similar shelters of quiet and solitude.

And yet I sensed that I had not just been pummeled by death but reshaped by it, poised now at some crucial junction between darkness and endurance, which is the realist's version of hope.

Barely on the verge of adolescence, I was still a shy girl who preferred math homework to boys. I was neither daring nor particularly unhappy, but booze flipped a switch in me I hadn't even known was there.

For years the psychic balm of alcohol—its holy grail certainty that it could take me through anything—eclipsed the hangovers and emerging fear that I was in trouble. I had a silver pocket flask that I filled with whiskey for backup drinks; I figured if I looked the part, then I could get away with the reality.

I'm afraid that if I stop drinking, I'll be dreary, and anxious all the time, and dull," I had told him. "Well, you might be," he had said matter-of-factly. "The only thing you can know for sure is that you'll be a whole lot less drunk." After a while, a whole lot less drunk was what I aspired to be.

My mother had asked me once after I was grown what my dad could have done differently, instead of bullying his way through my rebellion. "I wish he'd just told me how much he loved me," I answered her. "I wish he could have just said, 'You are precious to me; I won't let you put yourself in danger.

If we are lucky, we love what we love in part because the object is worth the effort. But sometimes the love itself-the elixir of desire-is enough to bestow the object with the transformative glitter it requires.

We attach ourselves to our familiar miseries, an easier act than striking out for the territory. This is a sad truth, though not insurmountable: Despair and fear do not disappear overnight when the conditions that wrought them have changed.

But as much as I complained about my solitude, I also required it. I put a high price on my freedom from obligation, of having to report to no one.

Being I loved, I think, is another matter entirely, a neighboring city on the same train route, connected but by no means destiny. If and when the bond takes both ways, you have a third entity, which is the thing the lover and the loved create together. This is called history, or experience, and the strong it is, the more power it has to muck about with the sense of self.

SCRATCH A FANTASY and you'll find a nightmare." This was one of Caroline's favorite sayings, spoken originally in regard to a mutual friend, a woman who had chased a dream life abroad and wound up trapped and unhappy. Then the saying became code for all those seemingly perfect lives being lived someplace else, with better jobs or partners or inner states.

All of us had been trained to take less than her share at the table, and some of us even hated and feared each other because that's what pressure from above teaches and forces and underclass to do.

IT'S TAKEN YEARS FOR ME TO UNDERSTAND THAT dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur and epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part—time and space and the heart's weariness are the blander executioners of human connection.

The lessons of those days were so basic: To view other women as allies rather than the competition. To unleash our intelligence, liberate our bodies, assume we were capable of things previously denied or unconsidered.

The struggle was hard-won, especially when the worst demons in the room were mine.

But she broke down when she started losing her hair. "I know this seems ridiculous," she said. "But it's the only thing I can focus on. The rest is too huge.

No one in this place seemed uncomfortable at the emotions of strangers. We had entered a subterranean culture of extremis, where people were dying or trying to live and the heart was laid bare.

We love what we love in spite of ourselves, toward something larger and more generous than the velvet prison of self.

But walls, whether brick or isolation, don't come down without a corresponding amount of labor.

We lived here for each other, and for everyone else we loved within twenty miles, and for all the good reasons people live where they live. They need the view of a wheat field or an ocean; they need the smell of a thunderstorm or the sound of a city. Or they need to leave, so they can invent what they need someplace else.

THE DETAILS OF dying are sad and grinding: breathing and waiting and breathing and waiting. The body, brilliant machine, knows how and when to close up shop. But Caroline was so strong, and so determined, that even in this final task she moved toward the end with bracing force.

A version of this, though, is always going on from the moment two people's time and space collide: Subtle or direct, we are negotiating the private and public spheres. If the wounds are on the inside, we have some choice about what to reveal when, and to whom. If the scar is one the outside-the physical signature that announces itself with the nuance of a trumpet-people tend to think they know a great deal about you, whether they do or not.