Eva Baltasar

Permafrost

Chloe

That’s when it happened, just when I seemed to have reached peak happiness: a midafternoon phone call. Midafternoon phone calls are the worst kind of phone call. There's something passionate about the catastrophe of a midnight phone call, an attempt on life by jump-starting the heart. We should all be on the receiving end of at least one midnight call a month, so that we can carry on living at another level of intensity. A mid-afternoon call, on the other hand, is a torpedo. 

It’s so painless at the end of the day. And there's so much beauty, born again in your own face, permeating the friendly halves of other people. Your senses are honed. You rediscover the sun, whose light shines all around you and falls over exteriors like geometric shapes at rest. I don’t see how this state of being can be normal. If it were, I might not be so shocked by everyone’s eagerness to go on living day after day. But nothing can possibly be so long-lasting. 

Permafrost quotes

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