I made spasmodic efforts to work, assuring myself that once I began working I would forget her. The difficulty was in beginning. There was a feeling of weakness, a sort of powerlessness now, as though I were about to be ill but was never quite ill enough, as though I were about to come down with something I did not quite come down with. It seemed to me that for the first time in my life I had been in love, and had lost, because of the grudgingness of my heart, the possibility of having what, too late, I now thought I wanted. What was it that all my life I had so carefully guarded myself against? What was it that I had felt so threatened me? My suffering, which seemed to me to be a strict consequence of having guarded myself so long, appeared to me as a kind of punishment, and this moment, which I was now enduring, as something which had been delayed for half a lifetime. I was experincing, apparently, an obscure crisis of some kind. My world acquired a tendency to crumble as easily as a soda cracker. I found myself horribly susceptible to small animals, ribbons in the hair of little girls, songs played late at night over lonely radios. It became particularly dangerous for me to go near movies in which crippled girls were healed by the unselfish love of impoverished bellhops. I had become excessively tender to all the more obvious evidences of the frailness of existence; I was capable of dissolving at the least kind word, and self-pity, in inexhaustible doses, lay close to my outraged surface. I moved painfully, an ambulatory case, mysteriously injured.

She cries,I laugh,She becomes numb,I become filled with joy,She slowly crumbles,I feel on top of the world,Yet somehow in the end,Out of the ashes,She rose like a Phoenix,As if nothing had ever touched her

Because sometimes people expect more, they expect their desires to be met, they fancy a future built on the pillars of their faith.But love is weak and impermanent and thus when the time comes, the pillars begin to crumble.Then again that doesn’t mean they can’t be built again. They can, they surely can, when the times are favorable and the state of affairs, sound.

Because sometimes people expect more, they expect their desires to be met, they fancy a future built on the pillars of their faith. But love is weak and impermanent and thus when the time comes, the pillars begin to crumble.Then again that doesn’t mean they can’t be built again. They can, they surely can, when the times are favorable and the state of affairs, sound.

My thoughts are free to roam back to the way she leaned her head on my arm for a split second, as if wishing she could let herself go, let herself lean farther. But she didn't, and I can’t help but respect her for that, even I know her strength is false, propped up by the shaky girders of Old Man Jack. One day soon, those girders will collapse, and her world will crumble, and I know I have to be there when that happens.

10. Comparison is the root of all feelings of inferiority. The moment you begin examining other people’s strengths against your most obvious weaknesses, your self-esteem starts to crumble!

You think the things you can touch and feel are the things that are real, but they are not. Over time, they all get old and decline. The people, the houses, the rocks and the mountains: one day they will all crumble. This is because they are not as real as the things that last forever. It is another one of the lessons we come to teach.