my favorite part of my favorite book which i just finished rereading

from Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“… Driving alone along the Northway, feeling more haunted than I had the courage to be, I cried in the car the way one does when leaving someone in a bitter and unbearable way. I don’t know why I should have picked that time to grieve, to summon everything before me- my own monstrousness, my two-bit affections, three bit, four. It could have been one of the hot awkward funeral (my grandmother’s, LaRoue’s, my father who one morning in Vero Beach clutched his fiery arm and fell dead off his chair mouthing to my mother, “Help. Heart. I love you”- how every death makes the world a lonelier place), it could have been some other time when the sun wasn’t so bright, and there was no news on the radio, and my arms were not laced in a bird’s nest on the steering wheel, my life going well, I believed, pretty well. It could have been any other time. But it was then: I cried for Sils and LaRoue, all that devotion and remorse, stars streaming light a million years after dying; I cried for boyfriends I was no longer with, the people and places I no longer knew very well, for my parents and grandmother ailing and stuck in Florida, their tough unchanging forms conjured only in memory; a jewel box kept in a medicine cabinet in the attic of a house on the moon; that’s where their unchanging forms were kept. I cried for everyone and for all the scrabbly, funny love one sent out into the world like some hit song that enters space and bounds off to another galaxy, a tune so pretty you think the words are true, you do! There was never any containing a song like that, keeping it. It went off and out, speeding out of earshot or imagining or any reach at all, like a rocket invented in sleep. …”