what possessed you to do the wrong thing when i needed the right thing the most? i don't ask for much from you. can't you see that anything less than not exactly right hurts worse than i already hurt? you've got to cure me or either love me so strongly that i feel some of this pain pass from me. those are the only things you have any business doing right now.
looking back on it all, i think the mistake i made with john woodrow had more to do with the careful way they raised me than anything else. growing up, i had absolutely no idea anything bad could happen in a life because nothing bad had happened in mind, no catastrophes. ... but worse than my ignorance of any bad coming into a life was the fact that i didn't have the imagination, the pure imagination to see that hard things or ugly things might happen farther on down the road. i was just whistling along.
you hear tell of somebody saying how so-and-so made him feel like a real man, how so-and-so made somebody feel like a natural woman and so forth... you hear about all that and i can honestly say that before i married ruby i'd felt like a boy on the outside looking in, but ruby, when she loved me, i said, This is what it must feel like to be a man. before then if somebody'd walked up to me and asked me right out who i was i'd have said, 'a tenant, one of the boys the hoovers use,' but now i'd say, 'i'm the man that was married to ruby.'
the quiet kind of love is better than the other, lasted longer, been better to us. oh, it's no crime to want and need somebody to love and to be loved by and to go and do what you need to do to have that.
