An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

from  On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978

In my house, the sunlight inhabits all the rooms,
which makes me think that I am someone important.
At the window, I fall into the slumber
of the nonbeing of everything I see.

I have only the sunlight on my face and arms. I am sad,
like a man who never leaves his house,
yet knows we live in a world of stones and trees
and has no use for the hastened moves
we call friendship.

by Constantin Abaluta, from It Might Take Me Years, An Anthology of Poetry