me

"What, baby?"
"She left me."
"Aw, girl.  Don't cry."
"She was my best thing."
Paul D sits down in the rocking chair and examines the quilt patched in carnival colors.  His hands are limp between his knees.  There are too many things to feel about this woman.  His head hurts.  Suddenly he remembers Sixo trying to describe the Thirty-Mile Woman.  "She is a friend of my mind.  She gather me, man.  The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.  It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind."

He is staring at the quilt but he is thinking about her wrought-iron back...  Only this woman Sethe could have left him his manhood like that.  He wants to put his story next to hers.

"Sethe," he says, "me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody.  We need some kind of tomorrow."

He leans over and takes her hand.  With the other he touches her face.  "You your best thing, Sethe.  You are."  His holding fingers are holding hers.

"Me?  Me?"
-Beloved

When I finished reading this passage out loud in class today, our last discussion day of the novel, I threw myself down on the desk in front of me in some dramatic demonstration of extreme emotion.  "This part kills me, girls.  It just kills me," I said, head buried in my arms.  

And it does.  

It tears me down and builds me up.

"This is not a story to pass on."
This is not a story to continue?
This is not a story to let die?
This is not a story to neglect?