Do you like me?” No answer. Silence bounced, fell off his tongue and sat between us and clogged my throat. It slaughtered my trust. It tore cigarettes out of my mouth. We exchanged blind words, and I did not cry, I did not beg, but blackness filled my ears, blackness lunged in my heart, and something that had been good, a sort of kindly oxygen, turned into a gas oven.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the pain and confusion that arises from unreciprocated feelings of affection, highlighting the emotional turmoil it can cause.
In this quote, Anne Sexton captures the intense emotional experience of longing and disappointment within a relationship. The silence that follows a vulnerable question creates a profound sense of rejection, resulting in feelings of isolation and loss. The imagery evokes the transformation of hope into despair, illustrating how the absence of affirmation can suffocate one's spirit, leading to an inward turmoil that is both consuming and disheartening.
In practice
In a discussion about heartbreak, one might use this quote to illustrate the feelings associated with unrequited love.
The Witch's Life" When I was a child there was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch. All day she peered from her second story window from behind the wrinkled curtains and sometimes she would open the window and yell: Get out of my life! She had hair like kelp and a voice like a boulder. I think of her sometimes now and wonder if I am becoming her.
Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.
Abundance is scooped from abundance yet abundance remains.
I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.
I am your dwarf. I am the enemy within. I am the boss of your dreams. See. Your hand shakes. It is not palsy or booze. It is your Doppelganger trying to get out. Beware...Beware...
We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!
Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.
Ten long trips around the sun since I last saw that smile, but only joy and thankfulness that on a tiny world in the vastness, for a couple of moments in the immensity of time, we were one.
I don't think your missing pieces ever fit inside you again once they go missing.
The thing about gay people is that until we come out of the closet, we're always protecting other people: 'I can't do this, because it's gonna hurt so-and-so.' We're trying to live the lives of other people, and that's the worst thing you can do.
They talked so, with secret hearts, without needing words, talking of other things... They could have suddenly continued their confessions aloud, without ceasing to understand each other.
Have you any other objection than your belief of my indifference?" - Elizabeth Bennet
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