Intermittent Ghosting Quotes

They say that people who live next to waterfalls don't hear the water. It was terrible at first. We couldn't stand to be in the house for more than a few hours at a time. The first two weeks were filled with nights of intermittent sleep and quarreling for the sake of being heard over the water. We fought so much just to remind ourselves that we were in love, and not in hate. But the next weeks were a little better. It was possible to sleep a few good hours each night and eat in only mild discomfort. [We] still cursed the water, but less frequently, and with less fury. Her attacks on me also quieted. It's your fault, she would say. You wanted to live here. Life continued, as life continues, and time passed, as time passes, and after a little more than two months: Do you hear that? I asked her one of the rare mornings we sat at the table together. Hear it? I put down my coffee and rose from my chair. You hear that thing? What thing? she asked. Exactly! I said, running outside to pump my fist at the waterfall. Exactly! We danced, throwing handfuls of water in the air, hearing nothing at all. We alternated hugs of forgiveness and shouts of human triumph at the water. Who wins the day? Who wins the day, waterfall? We do! We do! And this is what living next to a waterfall is like. Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night's sleep and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn't hear her husband's ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-grandchildren's will be. But we learn to live in that love.

Dating from a place of co-dependency, like a lot of us do, is immediately feeling as though the guy you went on a few dates with (who keeps ghosting you) is suddenly the one - just because he ticks a few of your boxes, texts you back sometimes and happens to be cute. But no, he's not being mysterious for intermittently disappearing on you. He's actually keeping you at a distance and playing on your need for validation, so that when he's done with his other options, he can return to you with minimal effort, knowing that you've been waiting for him all this time.

I watched her. I was a ghost in the woods, silent, still, cold. I was winter embodied, the frigid wind given physical form. I stood near the edge of the woods, where the trees began to thin, and scented the air: mostly dead smells to find this time of the season. The bite of conifer, the musk of wolf, the sweetness of her, nothing else to smell. She stood in the doorway for the space of several breaths. Her face was turned towards the trees, but I was invisible, intangible, nothing but eyes in the woods. The intermittent breeze carried her scent to me again and again, singing in another language of memories from another form. Finally, finally, she stepped on the deck and pressed the first footprint into the snow of the yard. And I was right here, almost right within reach, but still one thousand miles away.

The lights flickered and went out, one by one, but still he could see. See what was coming at him down the corridor that was now as narrow and inescapable as a coffin buried six feet below. It was not the drifting ghost he expected or the shambling corpse, but both and neither. A jerking, spasmodic marionette, deranged and surreal, backlit by a dirty yellow illumination. A stark, ghastly figure in fast motion, head whipping from side to side, limbs twitching…like an image sped up on film with every second or third frame removed so that its locomotion was disconnected and intermittent, a strobing and insane animation.

I had come to Alexandria exhausted from moral calculations, but here they were, dredged up again. Some days I sought to flee the past. I wanted to think of nothing. Like a jungle beast I wanted my violences to have no meaning and no consequences. On those days, the scratch of Josef's pen, the intermittent clearing of his throat was an irritant that chafed abrasively at the conscience I wished to deny I had, and complicated my numb embrace of beastliness. On other days, I condemned myself savagely -- judge, jury, and hangman -- and sank without defense or justification into the damnation of the past. At those times, Josef's presence was a torment. He became host to a legion of ghosts haunting me sweetly.