:༅｡ᴛɪᴀ's ɢᴀʟᴀxʏ☕

The drop was scarier, and the landing harder, than he had thought it would be, but he made himself recover quickly and went over to where Jude was and wrapped his arms around his waist, tucking his leg around a spindle to brace himself. “I’ve got you,” he said, and Jude leaned out over the edge of the railing, farther than he could have done on his own, and Willem held on to him so tightly that he could feel the knuckles of Jude’s spine through his sweater, could feel his stomach sink and rise as he breathed, could feel the echo of his fingers’ movements through his muscles as he twisted and unkinked the twigs of wire that were fastening the window into its stile.

A Little Life

A Little Life

"Have you ever noticed how Jude always wears long sleeves?”

A Little Life

Your tears a sea for me to swim
And I hear a storm is comin' in
My dear, is it all we've ever been?

Anchor up to me, love

“Has he seemed suicidal to you?”
“What? No. Is that what he was trying to do?”
“Is he eating regularly, sleeping? Does he seem listless, out of sorts?”
“He’s seemed fine,”
"Willem—you call me right away.”
“I promise,”

📚A Little Life

It was that, when he and his colleagues sat there at night, the group of them burrowed deep into their own ambitious dream-structures, all of them drawing and planning their improbable buildings, he was doing nothing. He had lost the ability to imagine anything.

A Little Life

“Two kids,” Malcolm had overheard his father say to someone at a dinner party celebrating one of Malcolm’s mother’s clients. “My daughter’s an editor at FSG, and my son works for Ratstar Architects.” The woman had made an approving sound, and Malcolm, who had actually been trying to find a way to tell his father he wanted to quit, had felt something in him wilt. At such times, he envied his friends for the exact things he had once pitied them for: the fact that no one had any expectations for them, the ordinariness of their families (or their very lack of them), the way they navigated their lives by only their own ambitions.

A Little Life

First there was the life of the office you saw: forty of them in the main room, each with their own desk, Rausch’s glass-walled room at one end, closest to Malcolm’s desk, Thomasson’s glass-walled room at the other.

A Little Life

Only to him and Jude would Lispenard Street be considered an achievement—for as much work as he had done to it, and as much as Jude had cleaned it, it was still sad, somehow, and furtive, as if the place was embarrassed to call itself a real apartment—but in those moments he would at times find himself thinking, This is enough. This is more than I hoped. To be in New York, to be an adult, to stand on a raised platform of wood and say other people’s words!—it was an absurd life, a not-life, a life his parents and his brother would never have dreamed for themselves, and yet he got to dream it for himself every day.

A Little Life

The thing that JB had always remembered most about this photograph was the expression on Jude’s face: a wariness that in those days he was never without. He hadn’t looked at this picture in years, but doing so made him feel empty, for reasons he wasn’t quite able to articulate.