Insomniac City

I used to think that the only thing worse than having insomnia was having insomnia next to someone who falls fast asleep and stays soundlessly so till morning.

“I just want to enjoy your nextness and nearness,” O says.
He puts his ear to my chest and listens to my heart and counts the beats.

“I don’t so much fear death as I do wasting life.”
Oliver Sacks

Are you conscious of your thoughts before language embodies them?”

Laughter rises. Hearing happy, laughing people is no cure for insomnia but has an ameliorative effect on brokenheartedness

I suppose it’s a cliché to say you’re glad to be alive, that life is short, but to say you’re glad to be not dead requires a specific intimacy with loss that comes only with age or deep experience. One has to know not simply what dying is like, but to know death itself, in all its absoluteness.

place where one comes to reinvent himself.

To be a New Yorker is to be away from the city and feel like you are missing something

In those early days of grief, short on sleep, forgetting to eat, I felt as though I were in a liminal state, not quite alive myself, which made me feel remarkably close to Steve

My new apartment was a virtual tree house, a tiny top-floor walk-up at eye level with the ailanthus boughs.