Anne de Marcken

That is what ritual does. It excuses us. Comforts us. Places us in a context so vast and ineffable we can confuse it with truth because it is impersonal and because it has a lineage and because it extends all the way – but only – to the limits of what we can conceive.

miss the way we retold each other the same stories as if we’d just remembered them. And the way we’d play along, asking questions to get at the details we already knew. I think it was so we would still recognise each other even as we changed. Like a snake is the same snake even after shedding its old skin. But now we are just the stories.

because we are, at the same time, creator and creation.

It makes me nostalgic for something I never knew.

Suddenly awake to the deviance available in every ordinary moment.

Hunger is an animal made of nothing.

‘Where is home?’

‘Home is like the moon,’ she says.

‘Filled with grief?’

‘Never where you expect it.’

What is familiar because I have seen it before and what is just part of a familiar story?

What is strange because I have forgotten it, or because it is new, or because this time I am on foot, or because this time I am undead, or because this time I am without you?

We hold things in our bodies. The earth holds things in its body. In clay. In ice. The real. The unreal. Time. Each other. All the chances we had.