Raluca Daniela

“Why were we all hoarding love, stockpiling it, when it was all around us, moving in and out of us like the air, if only we could feel it?”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“Without love, it cannot be seen.”
― Ryukishi07, Umineko WHEN THEY CRY Episode 2: Turn of the Golden Witch, Vol. 1

“Now Janie ordered a drink and glanced at the bar menu, choosing the goat curry because she'd never had it before.
"You sure about that?" the barman said. He was a boy, really, no more than twenty, with a slim body and huge, laughing eyes. "It's spicy."
"I can take it," she said, smiling at him, wondering if she might pull an adventure out of her hat on her next-to-last night, and what it would be like to touch another body again. But the boy simply nodded and brought her the dish a short time later, not even watching to see how she fared with it.
The goat curry roared in her mouth.
"I'm impressed. I don't think I could eat that stuff," remarked the man sitting two seats down from her. He was somewhere in the midst of middle age, a bust of a man, all chest and shoulders, with a ring of blond, bristling hair circling his head like the laurels of Julius Caesar and a boxer's nose beneath bold, undefeated eyes. He was the only other guest that wasn't with the wedding party. She'd seen him around the hotel and on the beach and had been uninspired by his business magazines, his wedding ring.
She nodded back at him and took an especially large spoonful of curry, feeling the heat oozing from every pore.
"Is it good?"
"It is, actually," she admitted, "in a crazy, burn-your-mouth-out kind of way." She took a sip of the rum and Coke she'd ordered; it was cold and startling after all that fire.
"Yeah?" He looked from her plate to her face. The tops of his cheeks and his head were bright pink, as if he'd flown right up to the sun and gotten away with it. "Mind if I have a taste?"
She stared at him, a bit nonplussed, and shrugged. What the hell.
"Be my guest."
He moved quickly over to the seat next to hers. He picked up her spoon and she watched as it hovered over her plate and then dove down and scooped a mouthful of her curry, depositing between his lips.
"Jee-sus," he said. He downed a glass of water. "Jee-sus Christ." But he was laughing as he said it, and his brown eyes were admiring her frankly over the rim of his water glass. He'd probably noticed her smiling at the bar boy and decided she was up for something.
But was she? She looked at him and saw it all instantaneously: the interest in his eyes, the smooth, easy way he moved his left hand slightly behind the roti basket, temporarily obscuring the finger with the wedding ring.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“Denise would never get over it. She knew that. Tommy's bones at the bottom of the well. She and Henry had spent some time with those bones. When the police had finished testing and tagging and photohgraphing them the funeral parlor had given them time before the burial. She'd clutched them to her chest. Run her fingertips along the smooth sockets that had held his shining eyes. There but not there.

Some part of her wanted those bones. Wanted to put the femurs under her pillow at night when she went to sleep. To carry his skull around in her purse so she'd be with him always.

She understood now how people went crazy and did crazy things.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time