The Fever Notebook

There was a time when you haunted me. Fever would come. I hid the restlessness and sat silent before everyone, only waiting. My eyes had grown so very tired.

Tell me, why doesn't the cold settle in wet eyes? And yet, look—stay in a wet body for a while and fever comes. In the end, the body must be tended to. And still, look, my eyelashes are soaked with tears—but I couldn't tend to them, could I?

Listen, do feelings also exhaust themselves after a time? I found a way. I won't wait so much longer for you. Do you understand what terrible anguish this thought kept me in? Every sense vibrated with its own echo of feeling, and it bewildered me. In those days I became so weak for you—beyond even what thought could measure. I never told you, but this fever wasn't natural—it was unbearable.

Watching someone collect old books, I thought: if only we could catalogue old people the same way, old feelings, memories from long ago—would we be wasting time doing so?