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Rock bottom.

The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know that I had fallen and could fall no further.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

There is, in fact, an incredible freedom in having nothing left to lose.

Marya Hornbacher, Wasted

I liked Hell I liked to go there alone relieved to lie in the wreckage, ruined, physically undone. The worst had happened. What else could hurt me then? I thought it was the worst, thought nothing worse could come. Then nothing did, and no one. Marie Howe, “Magdalene: The Addict”

I was offended by the lessening, by the heap renewal. By a going on that gradually left the important behind. But now it’s different. I want the large and near, and endings more final. If it must be winter, let it be absolutely winter. Linda Gregg, “Part of Me Wanting Everything to Live”

People like us get so heavy and so lost sometimes So lost and so heavy that the bottom is the only place that we can find We get dragged down, down to the same spot enough times in a row The bottom begins to feel like the only safe place that you know  Fiona Apple, “Heavy Balloon”

Ophelia: Oh, I shall have to stay here for a while in glassy water, in a seaweed net, until this fact and I are reconciled: I wasn’t loved, it’s as simple as that. Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, trans. Barbara Bogoczek & Tony Howard (1926)

I have been looking for a lover all my life, but no one will ever caress me like this loss.

Michelle Poirier Brown, “Sacred Loss” 

She would think about her childhood, the misery that resulted from that wound, eventually becoming its own salve. From the wound itself, she made a world and this world that she had made out of her own horror was full of interest and was even attractive.

Jamaica Kincaid, See Now Then

I know one mustn’t leave a bandage on all one’s life just because it once did some good.

Rainer Maria Rilke in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, in Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters

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When Laura Van Prooyen said We keep telling the other, I love you and I love you, and we do, though we both know where the knives are, and when Joan Didion said I think we most fully understood each other when I tried to kill him with a kitchen knife...love and death are so very close.

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On notebooks/journals:

Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all?

Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearranger of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentment of loss.

– Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

A notebook, probably, or a to-do list of everything we do not yet know but might actually want, also about flowers, travels, books / not-books, poems / not-poems, communist desire, brand mismanagement, perfume, and the other senses, ideas about love and also ideas about the shape of ideas, what does it mean to be tethered to the world and what brings about unending or untetherment.

– Anne Boyer

Proof that you lived is that you kept notebooks. 

– Fanny Howe

Notebook is my favorite genre. 

– Anne Boyer

‘Write something every day,’ she said, ‘even if it’s only a line, it will protect you.’

– Elaine Feinstein

Why else keep a journal, if not to examine your own filth?

– Anne Sexton

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Ada Limón, What I Didn’t Know Before

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Since a lot of people don’t seem to know this: Marie Antoinette never said “Let them eat cake.” But she did have awesome last words: she apologized to her executioner after she accidentally stepped on his foot on her way to the guillotine.

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“If you forget everything else about me, please remember this. I walked down that street and I never looked back and I love you. I love you. I love you so much that I shall hate you for ever for today.”

— John Fowles

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Ludwig Van Beethoven’s last words were: “I shall hear in heaven!”

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Dorianne Laux, “This Close,” in: What We Carry

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Sharon Olds

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Marie Howe, from What the Living Do

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Jenny George

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– Robert Bly

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James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

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Christine Garren