Autumn Christian's Blog, page 5

The Gospel of the Dispossessed

I was finally able to meet Sean in person last year after several years of knowing him online. I was impressed with Blacktop Wasteland, and found in its pages someone who cared about the people who fell through the cracks, the kinds of characters that other protagonists stepped over on the sidewalk or avoided on their way to a glamorous party or an exciting legal drama. The man himself was no less impressive. Sean was incredibly enthusiastic and passionate about literature, he had a genuine and infectious love for it that he couldn’t contain. I’m excited to have him for a short interview in the newsletter today, and be sure to watch out for his new book coming out, All The Sinners Bleed.

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AC: I'm going to try to avoid asking you the questions you've been asked a million times before, because I don't want this interview to be a creative exercise in how many different ways you can answer the question "Where do you come up with your ideas?" So I'll start with this. When I first read Blacktop Wasteland a few years ago what struck me about the book was your characterization. Every character felt real and solid, as if you understood them implicitly, and I found myself enjoying the quiet character moments even more than the big action pieces. I think it's your understanding of people that sets you apart from a lot of other thriller writers. Where do you think this understanding comes from, and how do you go about crafting your characters to make them feel real?

SA: I think  that's a really interesting question. I think my understanding or empathy,  comes partly from my upbringing.  My mom was a religious person with a philosophical bent so she read the Bible but also read Kant. She passed that emotional curiosity on to me. It also comes from working at a funeral home for a number of years where I learned to empathize with all manner of ppl during the most difficult time of their life.  I use all that experience in my work 

AC: I've heard that you worked at a funeral home before. How did that come about? I've always been interested in funeral homes and mortuary science but I backed out of mortuary school at the last minute when I realized I didn't want to deal with grief all day, I just wanted to do something important and impact full to other peoples lives. Are there any particular experiences you can remember that stand out?

SA: Sure , so what happened was I was working full time as a retail manager and  I felt like I was never going to write the books I really wanted to write working 50 hrs a week.  I started looking for a part time job and a friend that I knew suggested I work at her family business which just happened to be a mortuary. What I learned there,  above all else,  was a deep and abiding empathy for even the most unpleasant ppl. Seeing ppl at the worst moment in their lives educated me about the vagaries of the human condition in a way no psychology class could 

AC: What attracted you to crime and thriller fiction?

SA: I think I've always felt like crime fiction is the gospel of the dispossessed 

AC : What interests you about the dispossessed?

SA: To me the lost , the dispossessed,  the broken are the most interesting characters to write about or the most interesting ppl to speak with....because all their polite pretences have been stripped away by time and circumstances and now they are like a raw nerve.  They are more real than anyone else you might meet 

AC: What books had the most impact on your life? Not necessarily your favorite, but the ones you read that changed you forever afterwards.

SA: Two books have had a profound effect on me as a person and a writer...

Beloved by Toni Morrison 

And THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME by Donald Ray Pollock...

They take all the things I just spoke about and ram then down your throat. You will either digest on their wisdom or you will mentally choke....which one happens says a lot about u as a person 

AC: I've always thought that rural people lived closer to the reality of death and pain, as it was always spoken about with such nonchalance. My grandma used to send us a Christmas card each year and between wishing us a Merry Christmas and telling us what all of our cousins were up would talk about how it was so cold that the calves came out of their mothers and hit the ground frozen. You just get so used to tragedy in a way that a lot of city people don't, because it's not sterilized and hidden away.

I remember talking to you in Los Angeles a bit about the kind of people you've met as a successful author. Do you think success as a writer has changed you as a person? What sort of challenges have you faced because of it? Do you think it's more difficult to connect with the side of you that understands dispossessed or do you think that understanding will never go away?

SA: Laura McHugh, author of WHATS DONE IN THE DARK once said to me rural writers,  especially ones who grew up in poverty,  have an innate understanding of the natural world and the reality of life and death that some folks in more metropolitan areas don't.  " You either chop wood  or you freeze to death, it's that simple "

For me I don't think I'll ever lose that connection despite any success I might find because it's intrinsically a part of me.  It's in my DNA

AC: What do you think your greatest challenge has been as a writer?

SA: I think ....not second guessing myself 

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How a Writer Deals with Baby Brain

“Mothers are all slightly insane.”
― J. D. Salinger

I haven’t written a newsletter in about a month because every time I sit down to write one, all I can really think about is the baby.

I’ve heard of this happening to other female writers. They have a baby and their life is reduced to small fingers, small toes, diapers, bedtime routines. Before I got pregnant I was terrified of it happening to me. I didn’t want to lose my creativity. I didn’t want the grey matter in my brain to shrink into the shape of a small child, my own body broken apart until it became irreducible.

About a week before Samantha was born I picked up two books to try to prepare myself for motherhood as a writer. The first was Life Among The Savages by Shirley Jackson. It turned out to be a fluffy memoir about her life as a mother, with Hallmark pieces about shopping or giving birth, with scant information about how she also managed to write. The dark woman who’d written We Have Always Lived In The Castle had been nicely sublimated and locked away, replaced by this chirrupy wife full of syrup and witty, but not too cutting, observations.

The second book was The Baby On The Fire Escape by Julie Philipps. I couldn’t even finish it. The first chapter was about the artist Alice Neel. Her husband left her and kidnapped her daughter, leaving her with his relatives in another country.  She had two sons later on with another man, but the daughter ended up committing suicide after Alice failed to recognize her at an art opening. The author tried to spin this as a revolutionary and courageous example of an artist who also tackled motherhood, but Alice instead came off as neglectful. Not exactly the role model I wanted.

So I ended up giving birth, without having a good blueprint of how I was supposed to be a writer and a mother. I only knew that I was going to make it work, and I wasn’t going to lose myself.

Losing is the wrong word.

Sometimes I have time to write, and I don’t, because I just want to hold Samantha and stare at her while she sleeps. I cradle her close as her tiny little fingers curl around me and I watch her tiny breath go in and out, a mystery being reshaped into skin.

I thought I’d be bored having a baby. I thought I would barely be able to wait until she was older. I don’t feel bored. I feel entranced with every moment, every curl, every sigh. Everytime she smiles the universe splits apart. My cells want to fold like origami. 

When she cries so hard she’s inconsolable and my body is flooded with adrenaline, I’m riveted to the moment. I lay down in the soft silence that comes after, when I’ve finally rocked her to sleep and she’s still in my arms, and I know that I’m exactly where I’m meant to be.

I thought having a child would be the death of my old self. In a way, I was right. The first time I held my child a clear rift appeared in my life. No matter what happened I couldn’t go back to the way things used to be. I’d entered a new phase of adulthood.

But death is just another word for nothingness. It is a thing that no longer exists. And when your old self dies, all that you have left of it is the memory, and sometimes not even that.

I don’t miss my old self because it would be like missing the time before I existed. There is nothing there to miss.

The days that I used to sit in my dad’s office as a child scrolling through Paranormal Activities forums, playing with my Neopets, and drinking orange soda are over. So are the days when I used to live in a drug house and take turns throwing knives at the wall. Even the memory of those moments can only be seen through the filter of the present.

It’s silly to me now that I spent so many years worrying about being reduced to “mother.” Mother is just another word for god. It’s the split open lip from which the flowers and blood and milk of the world pour out. Being “mother” means that I get to see how cells divide, what chooses to create itself over and over again. 

So I’m okay with writing a little less and with not being so productive. I’m okay with losing myself in her eyes and the whorls of her face.

When I look at Samantha I don’t just see her, I see me and her father, an unbroken chain to the beginning, the thing that holds the moon captive for the sea. I know that one day she’ll be too big for me to hold in my arms, and each moment I have to keep her safe and close to me is scored in such a brief period of time that it’ll be over far before I’m ready.

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33 Dreams for a Woman Who Doesn't Want To Hope

On November 1st I turned 33. My friend Regina Watts called it “The Jesus Year.”

33 years is enough time to start a religion that changes the infrastructure of society, enough time to make the world weep forever for the moment you die. The nails that drove those wrists into a piece of wood were more powerful than the atomic bomb. 

But it still doesn’t feel like enough time. 33 years is nothing. 33 years doesn’t even register in the eyes of the universe. Redwood trees will have grown on the eyelashes of God before he can even blink. Another blink and the human race has died. Ash has buried all of our electrical wires and libraries. The sun will have blown through the planets and cooled into a dark core. It’s never enough time.

Then again, it never does feel like enough time.

I have often wondered what it’d be like to die, but in my dreams I usually suffocate underwater. Or I drink a poisoned margarita and vomit my heart up in the bathroom, my sweaty face pressed against the toilet lid. I rarely imagine what it’d be like to be crucified.

But I do imagine the worst pain would be after the nails had been driven in and the cross set upright, my body trying to pull itself down into the earth, each hour moving me closer to a death that’s suddenly not coming fast enough. My god, my god, why have you forsaken me? In bible study and in seminars people used to emphasise how cruel and awful Jesus’s death was. It was so special and profane to die in that way, to feel the profound emptiness of God’s absence on that hill.

But Jesus died the death of a common criminal. The point of his death wasn’t that it was special. It was ordinary. So goddamn ordinary. My god, my god, why have you forsaken me? We all die without the knowledge of a special presence. We all die alone.

The ordinary life of a human being is an unknown and unfathomable cruelty to a god.

The ordinary life of a human being is unknown and cruel even to us.

I used to be terrified of death. 33 may be the first year that the thought of dying doesn’t keep me up at night, its fangs on my neck. My daughter probably has a lot to do with that. For the first time in my life I realized that I could exist beyond the borders of my consciousness.

33 would be a good year for an old self to die, so a new one can be born.

Other than that, I don’t attach any special significance to the year 33. 33 is the atomic number of arsenic and the modern Russian alphabet contains 33 letters. And according to Islamic philosopher Al-Ghazali everyone in heaven is eternally 33. It’d be a good year to live forever. I’m still young enough to do a burpee and get carded at the grocery store, but I’ve cast off the easy existential angst of youth. 

Baby fat gone. Baby stretchmarks in. I used to write in 24 hour coffee shops at 2 A.M. because I had no home to go back to. Now I write with my daughter Samantha strapped to my chest, hoping that when she’s older the sound of the keyboard will remind her of warmth, safety, sleep.

In celebration of turning 33, here’s 33 things that I want but have never dared to hope for.

I want a family that I will never see as my enemy. A family that never turns on each other.

I want a daughter that is fed on love and never has to be starved of compassion. She will never know she needed it because she’s never had to do without.

I want to see the mysteries that I have hidden from my own eyes

I want to write enough books that a teenage girl can spend an entire month getting lost in them. Cool November nights, windowpane frosted, warm bedsheets, and a stack of Autumn Christian novels.

I want to be a great writer. I want the words that I write to be heated at the edges. When they’re read aloud I want the pressure on them to feel so tight that they’re ready to break. I want to write dangerous words. I want reality to come screaming through them.

I want to sleep and wake without nightmares that have me sobbing, my chest a cave.

I want to feel completely in control of myself and stop abdicating responsibility for my own life

I want to look in the mirror and see what I actually look like.

I want everyone I love to become better because I love them

 I never want to feel like the things I have chosen are a burden that I’m helpless to control

I want to have a home that is open to creatives, artists, interesting people. I want my home to be a hub of activity and discussion. A true “safe space.”

I want to be able to look people in the eyes without feeling like I’m going to flinch waiting for the blow.

I want to have hair that goes down to my waist.

I want to become bored of my own fears and come up with new ones

I want to love without it hurting me.

I want to stop putting my pain on a grand pedestal of worship. Like Jesus, I want to own the ordinariness of my own suffering.

I want to understand that I am something greater than myself. I am the cathedral built out of everyone around me. I am an ocean of skin and glass. An eternal reflection.

I want to stop taking the easy way out.

I want to stop letting the fear of becoming someone better prevent me from becoming someone better. I want to stop letting the loss and the grief guide me into deeper pits of hell, round and round, until I’m frozen, glacial, in the center of my self imposed misery.

I want to stop dragging my past behind me like a corpse

I want to embrace the chaos of the unknown and let the excitement of the strange propel me forward

I want to speak loudly and confidently. I want to keep my shoulders straight. I want to meet the world with my eyes like it belongs to me. I want to know that I am not an accident.

I might not ever stop feeling like an alien among humans, but I want to at least become a good approximation at being human.

I want to stop going to anger as my first emotion

I want to stop fantasizing about everything that could go wrong. I want the fantasies to stop feeling like prophecies.

I want to stop being so afraid of what insipid, worthless, weak people think about me, my thoughts, my writing. I want to stop letting the criticism bother me. I want to aim for the truth regardless of what other people do.

I want to stop thinking that other people will be the solution to all my problems.

I want the perfect leather jacket

I want to be a good wife

I want to move through each day like I accomplished what I set out to do

I want to stop telling myself grandiose narratives of pain, and start dreaming up new ways to hope.

I want to never acquiesce to failure. I don’t want to come up with self delusional narratives that make me think my own failure is okay.

Every day I wake up I want to see the world born anew in your eyes. Again and again.

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How to Escape Parenthood Regret

“The soul is healed by being with children.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Right before I got pregnant I worked as a waitress at Chili’s for about a month. I never realized before how many people were so unhappy. Single women would come to the bar and order multiple margaritas with tears streaming down their faces. Couples would come in for date night, glare at each other from across the table, and complain about every single food item. 

It was the people with children that usually seemed the most unhappy. Parents would stare with learned helplessness as their kids screamed and ran around the restaurant. They'd wear their regret and pain like a bone disease. They'd ignore their children as they tugged on their sleeves and cried. They'd pacify them with tablets and video games as they burrowed themselves in their own phones.

I’d been trying to have a child for nearly a year at that point. How did I escape becoming a miserable and worn specter of myself? Their faces became haunted and liquid, like melted versions of their old selves. They dragged their feet behind them like they were practicing to be a corpse before they were already in the grave.

I didn’t want to become one of those mothers who chopped their hair off because they couldn’t be bothered anymore, who yelled at their kids in parking lots and wore a perpetual sneer. All of the vitality and curiosity drained from them, and for what? Some altar of self-sacrifice. Some god of responsibility that underneath their disguise was actually a demon of personal betrayal.

People would laugh and sneer when I announced my pregnancy. “Say goodbye to your personal life.” “Just wait until they’re teenagers.” “Good luck never sleeping again.” It was a sick and twisted sense of inevitable misery. A shared schadenfreude. 

My daughter is almost a month old now.

I shouldn’t have been so afraid. 

It’s not that difficult to put aside your annoyance and anger and take joy and care in your child’s existence.

The fussiness, and the lack of sleep, and the lack of hands, and the house falling behind, and the lack of time, and the dirty diapers - you can either see it as a gross thief of your will and autonomy, or as a temporary moment in time that you need to pour your love into the next version of yourself.

Resentment is a decision. A decision that is made over and over and over again, in small and easy ways, until the light disappears from your face. Until you look at your children and only see the life that they stole from you, when really you were the one who stole it in the first place.

I’ll have time in the future to go party, hang out with friends, play videogames, and sleep 8 hours. I can do that at any time in my life. But I only have this moment in time to take care of this tiny human being, to hold her close and see the comfort she takes in being next to her mother. In being able to take care of her. Feed her.

Soon I’ll never have that again.

Sometimes I look at her sleeping and tears start pouring down my cheeks. I always wondered why it ws so difficult to love me, why I was always told I was a “difficult” child, why I was always made to feel like a burden, a monster, evil, selfish. Even before the age of five I felt the weight of my cursed bones and my cursed eyes. No matter what I did I couldn’t escape being a Bad Kid.

Again and again I asked myself, why was I so difficult to love?

Even now at thirty two years old I wake up crying, with this invisible, pressing desire to be held. To be comforted. By who? I don’t know. By a mother that never existed. A version of myself that never existed. 

There’s an empty, hollow space inside me where the love should’ve been. When I swallow I can taste the charcoal and bitter mercury at the edges of the vacuum inside me. And no matter how many hours I’ve been held, comforted, told that I’m loved by other people - the vacuum never disappears. It’s an all consuming need.

I used to think that the only way to cure myself would be to go back in time. Back to the origin point. The fawn would jump back into its mother’s womb. The stars would be pulled back into the center of the universe. The only way to make things right would be to ensure they were never made at all

But now sometimes at night I look down at my sleeping daughter in my arms, and I realize of course there was no going back. Not now. Not ever. Time will never rewind. The bomb will never knit itself into a single piece. The dead flower will never bloom with color again.

Now I see the truth. There’s only going forward.

It’s not difficult to love a child. It’s the easiest thing in the world. 

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Dreaming of The End Of The World

“Apocalypse is a frame of mind." [Nicodemus] said then. "A belief. A surrender to inevitability. It is a despair for the future. It is the death of hope.”
― Jim Butcher

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People talk about the world ending so often that I’m surprised I don’t go outside and see more necks craned up toward the sky. Waiting. For a meteor or a nuclear bomb. For the sky to shake and bleed, spilling out, boiling the rivers and turning the waves of the ocean as gray and necrotic as dead skin.

For thousands of years we’ve scribbled prophecies, and taken ritualistic drugs while babbling about death, and drawn calendars with definite end dates, and written stories, and prayed to gods about the end of the world. Yet the world continues to persist despite our best efforts. 

End dates come and go. Every battlefield soaks up the blood. We rebuild on top of bomb damage, after the smoke has cleared, after green sprouts push through the rubble. The gods seem to get bored of their own deadly visions. Life goes on despite our best efforts.

I used to wonder why we were so obsessed about the world ending. I didn’t understand why we wanted to see thousands of years of human progress, with its libraries and coliseums and skyscrapers and knee surgeries swept away. Why did people want to lay down in a soft bed and have their eyes burned out? Why did our stomachs growl with hunger at the thought of returning to dust. Why did so many people want a world reduced to bones?

 But now I understand that after years of cleaning dog vomit out of the carpet, and scrubbing the mildew out of the shower, and failed relationship after relationship, and little disappointments that leak into your stomach and wear away the lining, that it can all start to feel a little tiresome. What is it all for, if you just fail over and over again? What is the point of cleaning the mildew out of the shower if it just regrows, again and again, a taunting thing, yellow that always manages to pierce through the pristine white?

At least if the world was ending that meant you’d have something to do. If the angels showed up with trumpets that caused earthquakes, and the demons broke through the crust of the earth with their mouths ringed with magma and blood, you wouldn’t have to clean the shower anymore. You wouldn’t have to sit in traffic anymore. You wouldn’t have to go to court because your baby daddy refused to pay child support, and you wouldn’t have to keep throwing away the rotten fruit you never ate, and you wouldn’t have to sit through another pointless meeting on Zoom, listening to the sound of your hair growing through the drone.

If the world ended you wouldn’t be frazzled, confused, bewildered, numbed out.

Doomsday cults and suicide prophets and apocalypse grifters resurface again and again to popular support because it seems like doom is better than what we have now.

This isn’t just something that stupid people or the uneducated fall for. According to a 2020 YouGuy survey, 3 in 10 Americans think there will be an apocalyptic event in their lifetime. A plague. Environmental disaster. Nuclear war. Judgement day. An alien invasion. The “Revolution.” 

If the world ends that means you can stop trying. You’re allowed to turn your face away from the future.

If the world ends, that means you can continue to pop soft yellow pills prescribed by overworked doctors, crawl into your bed and smoke weed, drink alcohol until you puke. It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to marry your girlfriend. Cheat on her if you want. It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to get into shape. You don’t have to set a good example. You don’t have to make friends with the sun and the moon, and the earth around you. You don’t have to find anything agreeable. Sneer at nature itself. Look through every window with disdain. It doesn’t matter. You don’t need to have children, because you’ll just be committing them to death and misery. 

What a relief that soon all of this will be muted and gray, crushed glass underfoot. It will be wonderful when this planet becomes something where nothing can grow. Flies will explode from the heat. Animals will lick the dust at the bottom of the lake before laying down to die together.

Listen to the tick of the clock. The second hand is on fire, and minute by minute we get closer to destruction.

But what if the world isn’t ending?

For some people that thought is unbearable. That means they have to keep cleaning the shower, and the dog vomit, and doing the laundry. They have to keep waking up to the wail of ambulances and the offending eye of the sun.

Remember, 3 in 10 Americans believe the world is going to end soon. Just because you’re not living in a cult compound, dressed in linen white, high on acid, underneath the sway of a wild-eyed charismatic leader, doesn't mean you’re not in a cult. 

Doom is a powerful sedative. Not only that, it’s a money-making machine. It’s a tool of compliance. It’s a copacetic drug. It’s a warm dream. You can let go of your own responsibility if you think at any moment the sky is going to explode in fire.

But nobody knows what tomorrow will bring. Maybe the world isn’t ending. Maybe you do bear the responsibility of the future. Every technological advancement we have is because someone believed in the future. They saw the snarled, ugly, tangled branches of the wild and believed they could make a better world. One with less discomfort. Less death. Less bitterness.

Even if World War 3, or a nuclear bomb, or a deadly pandemic happens - it doesn’t mean the end of the world. We’ve recovered as a species from worse. We’ve recovered from the destruction of entire civilizations. The blood soaks into the ground. The sky clears. The buildings are repaired. We continue on.

If you stopped believing in the apocalypse, you’d have to learn to live in this reality. You’d have to deal with disappointment. You might have to try to find joy in even simple things that you used to hate, like cleaning the shower or getting up in the morning. You’d have to realize that this world is all you’re going to get, and you can either numb yourself to it or learn to live here. Because there are no singing choirs of destroying angels. There is no laughing demon. There is no promise of obliteration. There is no way out, not really.

If you stopped believing in the apocalypse, you’d maybe, actually, have to learn how to be happy instead of waiting for a God to come down and crush you.

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A Child's Image Burnt Into The Flowers

Last Sunday morning at 5:53 A.M, September 25th, my daughter Samantha was born.

The words “my daughter” still sound so foreign to me. An odd and twisted shape on my tongue, something that makes my heart ache as it tries to initiate itself into my new understanding of reality. My daughter. It throbs in my throat. It makes the back of my spine ache.

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I’m currently writing this at 3:30 in the morning with Samantha asleep in my lap. I’ve finally figured out a good position to be able to type and hold her at the same time. I don’t know when I’ll go back to my regularly scheduled posting, as newborns are a little demanding, but I’ll write sporadically as I’m able. Here are some of my notes from her first week of being alive.

The entire process of labor from the time my water broke to when Samantha was born took almost twelve hours exactly. Time began to dilate and stretch. It bubbled underneath me and I began to live within a warm moment that existed outside the ordinary flow of seconds, minutes, hours. It was like a natural hallucinogenic. It all had the feeling of being a religious experience, both mystical and unreal.

I think oftentimes significant moments in our lives are only understood to be significant in retrospect. The moment I heard Samantha and the doctor laid her on me to hold I felt my old existence shatter. Everything became different in a clean, broken line.

She smells like a soft woodland grove, a twilight and safe circle that exists in a world without dust

l thought I had several weeks to prepare, so I hadn't packed anything. But maybe a part of me knew, because yesterday and that morning I’d cleaned the house and written up contact info and what we needed to pack before going. My water broke around 6 p.m. while i was making dinner and I bent over to feed one of my dogs. I forced mysef to move with purpose, slow, as Robert and I went around the house gathering everything we needed. I felt calm when Robert dropped me off at the hospital and I walked up to the front desk and told them I was in labor, when I signed myself in and presented my ID. Everything was already in its right place.

The contractions started on the ride to the hospital, but only became extremely painful about six hours in. I only asked for the epidural when they became too painful for me to think or speak through. Even though natural labor and at home birth is in vogue, I found a safety and peace of mind of being in the hospital surrounded by professionals, and was able to relax when the epidural kicked in, enough to get some sleep and listen to ASMR on my phone. Another 6 hours of unmedicated contractions would’ve made me extremely exhausted and stressed when it came time to push.

I think it does a disservice to women to call birth “traumatic” as a matter of course, Trauma is a physiological response gone wrong. It’s when the nervous system cannot process past memories. Trauma does not just mean pain. It’s an intense process, and I think it does change you forever, but that’s not trauma. That’s significance. That’s revelation. 

I thought I’d find feeding and holding my newborn to be boring, but I’m endlessly fascinated staring at her. Just watching her nurse is engaging. It’s like staring into a mirror of my future self, a promise bound in blood, ancient stars, small eyes that will soon swell and grow and see, heated and mixed in her parent’s DNA.

I used to daydream about going into the past and changing it. I wanted a family that loved me in the way I needed to be loved. I wanted to hold my arms out without flinching. I wanted to look into the mirror and stop seeing the ghost of a wounded child, smudged charcoal where my heart should have been. I have lost count of the hundreds of hours I cried because I could not go back and reverse time. Now I see that there was another way. Another way to be whole. It was forward.

I so desperately want to be normal sometimes. The fact I can get pregnant, carry a healthy baby, and fall in love with her is a relief. It’s a testament to the fact that my damage hasn’t penetrated the core of being. That there’s something uncorrupted inside of me - something that does not care I see myself as rotten and crumbling soft.

We had to stay in the hospital an extra night because Samantha’s bilirubin was a little high and she needed light therapy. Although they ended up finding a room for us they initially told me I would have to leave her as they’d run out of beds. I immediately started sobbing at the thought of leaving her behind. It was a primal, searing ache. I’d never felt anything like it before.

All of my doubts about wanting children dissolved when she was born. It soon became the only clear and bright road. I saw death then, everywhere else I looked, an emptiness where alternative promises used to be. I had many glittering alternative futures once. They all had their own special, shiny gloss. A life in Paris as a feminine flaneur, with a rotating cast of lovers, nights spent drinking wine and smoking cigarettes with fascinating strangers. A life in a bayou town, living in a shack by myself, miles away from anyway else so I could write in heated, green seclusion. A life in Los Angeles, writing by day and working as an exotic dancer at night, shivery high on cocaine and tequila as I strutted in clear lucite heels. They all died. The shimmer faded. It revealed the laughing skull underneath. None of those futures would’ve made me as happy as my current present.

Family really is the only thing that matters. And I mean real family, the people who actually care about you, who have determined to move with you through life. It’s the only thing that’s ever made me truly happy. Even the things that I’m passionate about, like writing, lose their significance and ability to make me feel joy if I don’t have someone to love.

Having a child feels like experiencing a new realm of terror. There is something that exists outside of your body, but is also you. All of a sudden there are things worse to lose than the self.

I couldn’t have done any of this without Robert. I feel safe and warm in my nest with Samantha as I recover from labor and tearing, and I’m able to focus on her and recovering without having to worry about the outside world. It’s a reminder that people are meant to work as a team. The concept of rugged individualism, without obligation or responsibility, quickly disappears in the face of such a huge responsibility and interdependence.

I was terrified of postpartum depression, but I’ve done a lot of internal work to prepare for this moment. The exhaustion is brutal, and I have to be constantly vigilant now, but I actually like the structure and the importance of each moment. Before it felt like so many days were wasted. Nothing feels wasted anymore. Everything around me has taken on a new dimension - even the mundane stuff I used to hate, like folding laundry or organizing supplies in the bathroom - it all shines with a kind of occult light. The chemical drop after birth doesn’t have to lead inevitably to depression,

I’ve been staring at Samantha for so long that I see her image everywhere I look. In walls, in the folds of bedding, burnt into the images of flowers. A sweet babies face, interposed on reality, over and over again.

I keep thinking of all the women in the past who had to give birth alone, unmedicated, without a hospital or anyone else to help. I see a woman going into labor alone in a cave by the sea, her contractions coming in and out with the tide. Her hair is overgrown, gritty with sand. Her eyes trap the moon, and with each push she begins to feel more and more like the moon. Her intense pain becomes its own special kind of gravity. She swells alone, shivering and unable to think. Her body turns into a dream that the ocean has at night.

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The Routine Boredom of Misery

“The path to paradise begins in hell.”
― Dante Alighieri

“To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity.”
― C.S. Lewis

It seems like at every party at least one person has to say, "I'm going to hell. But at least hell won't be boring."

After two hours in a dimly lit room, our heads trapped in cigarette smoke, key bumps in the bathroom, sour beer, lazy attempts at seduction, a bad headache, I have to wonder what kind of hell they're expecting. There's nothing more boring than a vague kind of numb suffering without purpose or origin. A hurt you can't even articulate.

I told myself I could endure any pain as long as it meant something, but I never could figure out for what reason we were all consigning ourselves to hell. In a back room there's two people having sex like they're practicing to be roadkill. There's a man in a corner on mushrooms telling a limp-necked girl that the only emotion a robot will ever be able to experience is anger. I try a drag of a cigarette and start coughing until I almost throw up. Someone is laughing at a joke I don't understand. Another person crouches in front of me, the whites of his pupils big enough to crawl through, and tells me "You shouldn't be so shy. Don't you know nothing matters?"

He doesn't seem to understand that's the problem. There's no reason to speak. There's no reason to crawl out from underneath my own shadow. At least, not until I figured out how to imagine heaven.

I couldn't see it, not at first. When I tried to imagine "heaven" I saw a musty church, its pews covered in dust. Ephemeral human shapes. A gospel choir that sung forever. God sitting on the altar, faceless and cast in light, insinuating himself between the sacramental wine and the communion wafers. A Sunday morning wearing a stiff yellow crinoline dress, my mother hissing at me to keep my feet still, except instead of an hour it went on forever.

Of course a heaven like that would be boring. For the longest time I mistook my lack of imagination for the shallow depths of reality. Hell wasn't interesting and fun. I'd been in enough backrooms, under back lights, throwing up in strange bathrooms, that I should've known that. But I kept going back to hell, over and over again. I never even looked for the way out.

I mistook familiarity and comfort for truth. Heaven was such a foreign concept to me that it didn't even register as a concept at all. It was too alien to my experience. At that point in my life if someone asked me to describe happiness I would have said, "Being left alone." Even nature disgusted me. I refused to appreciate trees, mountainscapes, stars. If I experienced awe I'd have to acknowledge there might be some kind of majestic truth outside of myself.

My concept of God had to be small enough to fit in my pocket. He had to be small enough that he'd slip between the bed frame and the mattress when I rolled over in bed in the middle of the night, sweating with anxiety.

Then I fell in love. It's always love that changes everything.

Happiness came to me in flashes and glimpses. At first it was something I could only look at in sideways glances, because head on it'd burn my eyes out. It was brighter than anything I'd ever even imagined.

All my possible futures had promised me I'd end up alone. I would have no great love. No children. I'd be an evolutionary dead-end. But love changed all that. It pried my eyes open to all the experiences outside my perception. It made me look at something that'd always been there.

I began to see a way out of hell.

For a long time I was recovering from anorexia, so my now-husband and I would eat facing away from each so that I'd feel safe. Whenever I did look into his eyes, I would hurt, all the way down to the bottom of my chest, because the look of love was so foreign to me. I couldn't recognize it, and in many ways it terrified me, but I still felt compelled to move toward it. We adopted a dog who'd been found in the woods, who was so feral and unsocialized that his foster mom put him into our car with chain-mail gloves on. During the day I read him Philip K. Dick stories. I fed him treats, one after the other across the floor, inch by inch, until he stopped being terrified to cross the threshold of doors.

The first time I came home and he jumped up, excited to see me, I didn't understand what was happening. I'd never contemplated that my work to take care of him would grow as love inside him.

I started looking up at the sky. I burst into tears the first time I saw the moon. I mean, really saw the moon, naked and beautiful, and glowing, small but awesomely huge in its all encompassing power. I imagined walking across its surface with Robert and my dogs (of which there were now two), right on the shadow line next to its dark side. I imagined the gravity of Earth tugging on my hair, silence so loud that it could've been a flood. My blood obtained its own weight. I didn't feel like a ghost anymore.

I was no longer an observer of existence. I was existence. It was like the smaller I became, interwoven into the landscape, another molecular structure amongst the earth and the sky, the flowers and grass, the more significant I felt.

I became conscious of the fact I could never disappear. My bad futures began to erase themselves. A possibility opened up. A small, gleaming road that twisted down into the dark. The shadows dispersed. Gleaming bulbs of light, shining through mirrors, appeared along the path. I saw myself with a family. A real family. I saw myself as a writer who could approach the keyboard with joy, instead of a headache, dry mouth, an endless anger. I could enjoy a glass of wine without trying to choke myself to get to the bottom.

I saw my husband and I with a child, crossing through the dry sea of the moon's light, through every possible permuted universe of pain, through the dark, to arrive at the beach together just when the sun was rising. The colors that splayed across the sand were a new language I had yet to learn.

Beauty kept seeping through the cracks of my numb disassociation, over and over again, no matter how much I tried to forget. I stopped being able to turn away from a baby's smile, a dog's tail wagging, forest leaves soaked in fall, the shivery rush of perfume that blooms in an empty hallway, clean bed-sheets, clean hair, the lingering drops of water on my hands after a bath. Everything took on a new significance.

Once you experience a taste of happiness, just a mere glimpse of it, the sweet and unbidden reality of experience that cradles you, you'll never get to go back to that comfortable, dark ignorance. It had always been there. I just couldn't see it.

I only thought heaven was boring because what I thought was heaven had actually been hell.

The gates of heaven burn brighter than the fires of punishment. Tolstoy was wrong when he said "Happy families are all alike." Happiness is not the same as stillness. It has a turgid undercurrent. It rushes through the air, through your consciousness, with a rapid frenzy. Happiness has its own kind of infinity. It can even be terrifying in its unfamiliarity, its alien experience.

I'd gotten used to every party in hell being the same, but in heaven there's always a new color, a new room, a new angle of the moon. The walls of the church explodes in an endless cosmic arrangement. The heads of angels emerge from the smoke.

Heaven is all around you. If only you could see it.

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The Heart of a Tyrant

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
― George Orwell

For every paradise I can imagine, I can conjure a hundred nightmares. The one I keep coming back to this week is the panopticon.

The 19th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham came up with the concept of the panopticon. He demonstrated the idea by designing a circular prison with a single guard tower at the center of it. None of the prisoners can see what the rest of the prisoners are doing, and they can't see the guard. But the guard, at the center of the prison, can see all the prisoners. Bentham's argument was that even though the guard can't be physically observing all the prisoners at once, their behavior would still improve because they could be observed at any time.

The panopticon is often used as a metaphor for the surveillance state. We live in a world of constant observation. Cameras observe us from every angle, glassy-eyed and unrelenting. Our purchasing history, phone numbers, locations, and personal information, are stored in databases away from our own eyes. Whenever we go on the Internet we leave digital traces of ourselves, a smear like an eternal ghost, across a dark landscape. We know that Amazon's Alexa is constantly listening to us. They've given Ring doorbell footage to the police without consent or knowledge from the owners.

According to Bentham this should make us all a more reasonable, well-behaved, and ethical society. We used to tell people that it was God watching our most private thoughts. It was God who snuck into the space between our pillow and the headboard, pressed his eyes between our fingers, and had his watchful angels stroke our hair. He knew our heart and he knew our mind and he knew each errant thought.

But at least we knew that God was fair and just. We knew that God's judgment was perfect, and he was never wrong. We knew that God could not be bargained or bribed with. He would not succumb to corporate interests. God could not be bought and paid for, or have ulterior motives, or loyalty to someone who had no interest in our well-being.

People are often indifferent to this surveillance. They feel as long as they're doing nothing wrong, or don't draw attention to themselves, they have nothing to worry about. After all - they're not evil, and they're not doing anything illegal. Only bad people get punished, is their rationale. And if this surveillance gets rid of more bad people, then all the better.

These kinds of people often use the phrase "Telling on themselves" when referring to someone saying something they think is evil or wrong. It's the language of a surveillance state. Like the person has just informed on themselves. They've revealed their secret ideas and their secret heart and they've shown themselves to be corrupted.

But it's not God that is watching us. We have no idea who is observing us from behind the cameras, behind the Amazon Alexa, going through our records and databases, in the center of the panopticon. The guard observing us may have been a prisoner himself, beaten and humiliated and bribed with an extra crust of bread. Maybe he's got swollen eyes and an angry heart and he's looking for someone to hurt. Maybe he wants to see us destroyed.

In my nightmare vision of the future the cameras don't just record your movements or your speech or your search queries. They record your heartbeat, your eye-tracking, the subconscious tics in your facial movements. They peel back your skin and skeleton, plug into your electrical pulse, and read your innermost thoughts. Imagine a future where if you think something the state doesn't like they can shut off your bank account and your car, send you you to jail, or force you to go to some kind of corrective rehabilitation.

This sounds like a fantastical nightmare, but it really isn't that far off from what we're seeing now. Several conservative activists have had their bank accounts closed down. People with Only Fans accounts and sex workers have their transactions denied. Hosting domains will shut down your website if they find it offensive. People have been fired from their jobs for expressing opinions on social media.

I'm sure everyone who follows me on Twitter is sick to death of hearing me talk about free speech, but the people who want to regulate speech actually want to regulate thought. They want to scrub away dissent from the surface of the earth.

I used to think the benefits of free speech were self evident to everyone. If you talk to most Americans they'll agree that free speech is a good thing. "Except"... they always seem to have an exception, something they find unacceptable. It's different for everyone. A little pet trigger, if you will. They believe they've found something so important that it shouldn't be allowed to be questioned. A precious little lie that they hold and nurture close.

Inside our hearts is a little tyrant with its fangs against the neck of love.

Wouldn't that be wonderful if you could walk into a room and demand everyone speak how you want them to? Act like how you want them to? The power would be intoxicating. You wouldn't have to suffer any discomfort you didn't want to. That's the power of emperors, warlords, and monarchs.

In many people's secret dreams they believe that they should be god. They think the world would be a better place if everyone just shut up and listened to them.

They want God's power without God's sense of love, justice, or truth. They want to be God so they don't have to look into the offending eye of someone who might contradict the fantasy version of themselves that's pure, good, just, unrelentingly right.

They want to be God not for your benefit. They don't particularly care if you're happy or fulfilled as long a you're quiet. And when they get tired of the silence, they want you to sing their praises. They want you to don the jester hat of their sacred ideology and sing its praises.

Not everyone gets to be god, though. Almost nobody does. Even the people who contribute to the enormous surveillance machine of control will usually find themselves swallowed by it. People aren't usually willing to share power.

The camera doesn't demand goodness. It can't be the arbiter of goodness. It demands obedience. Sometimes even when it gets obedience, it might even destroy you for fun. Or because you're inconvenient. Because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Because you have something that someone else wants and they're envious. Because it wants to make someone into an example, because it doesn't like your smile, because it needs to fulfill a quota, because it was irritable that day and needed to hurt something.

After all, who is regulating this camera? It's only regulated by itself.

We want to destroy the panopticon because whoever sits at the center is not God. They just think they are, which is an attribute they share with toddlers, drug addicts, narcissists, political activists, and serial killers. And if we don't destroy it quickly enough we might find it nearly impossible to escape.

We'd be forever subject to the whims of a tyrant. A tyrant that cannot be questioned. A tyrant who does not have to answer to the people. A tyrant that grows more corrupt by the day.

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I Stared Back At Myself From The Abyss

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been concealed by the answers. — James Baldwin

I didn't become an artist with any lofty aspirations about saving the world. I just liked the way that it felt when my hand moved across the page, the sound of the keyboard, the quiet, the bloom of images. Anyone who is doing their job correctly is working to save the world. That's nothing special.

I also didn't become an artist because I wanted to be famous. I was too young to even really understand what "famous"" meant when I made that decision. Once you meet enough artists you begin to get a feel for who actually enjoys the work, and who just wants to get invited to parties and win awards and have dinner with famous people. Curiosity and growth is often sacrificed for trend-chasing and they put more effort into their social media presence than their art. I wouldn't worry too much about these people. History always recognizes them for frauds.

Art is dangerous. I used to think this was a cozy platitude because artists need to be made self-important, but it's true. So much of human violence is spawned out of an idea. The wrong idea will have people feeding you to the dark, to the wolves, to anything hungry enough to eat. The wrong idea will spill blood across continents, turn every shadow into a monster.

The artist is not a politician or an ideologue. Art often intersects with these spheres but first it must connect with people on the emotional level. Art is about the experience that exists beyond words. Not a foregone conclusion, but an experience. An interaction. A question. Everything else is propaganda.

Failure is important on the path to success, but bitterness, resentment, and giving up will guarantee ultimate failure. You should be afraid of that kind of failure. It will only cost you everything.

At the same time, personal failure isn't that big of a deal. Even if you fail as an artist you can still be a good example as a friend, human being, citizen. Maybe art just isn't for you. A passing fancy. A phase. There are so many of us struggling to make art because we are nature's experiments. Even if one of us fails, not all of us will.

The artist is almost always in a constant struggle between their continued existence and the ability to fully express themselves. Free speech isn't real. It's a myth. There have always been things you can't say without devastating consequences. And that space changes depending on the culture.

If someone doesn't absolutely hate you for the things that you create, you're probably not pushing yourself hard enough.

The concept of a writing "career" is overrated. Oftentimes it's a Faustian bargain. You get to do what you want (writing) but oftentimes you don't get to actually write what you want. Unless you just like the act of physically typing out words, it sort of defeats the purpose. The ideal outcome is to get paid to do the kind of writing that you want, but only a few people manage to achieve that.

There is an entire industry of rabid, sociopathic predators who want nothing more than to take your money because they know you're hungry for a dream. To many in the world your desire to be an artist is more important than anything you could ever produce, because desire can be exploited in a way that the art itself can't.

The worst thing you can do to yourself as an artist is try to sell your soul and realize that nobody's buying. It turns out that what you thought was worthwhile was ordinary, unwanted, and there are millions of people out there who are willing to do more, for less, and they're actually enthusiastic about it. Grateful, even.

So many people talk about being courageous in their art but they don't even know how to say "no" to a party invite or tell someone the truth when it's difficult. How can you expect to be an artist who can tell the brutal, unflinching truth about the world around you when you're so lost you've forgotten the lies you've told yourself?

People often tell me that I'm "lucky" that I'm able to have the resources I need in order to write, like they just fell into my lap and I didn't orchestrate my whole life in order to do that. Every single life decision I've made has taken my ability to continue writing in consideration. Don't expect the right life circumstances to happen by accident.

The only truly transgressive art is that which tells the truth. And nothing makes people more hateful, angry, murderous, and cruel than a truth they don't want to hear.

The artist is not a pure vessel, and society is not a tainting force. Artists often express the desire to be left completely alone in order to create, but if such a thing were to actually happen they'd either disappear or become completely irrelevant. It is the pressure of society and its demands that shapes the artist. Its the pressure that can turn your iron into steel.

Artist as factory worker, artist as blue collar, artist as someone who must constantly “produce” has been an overall net negative. You cannot sit down and do mental work for 8 hours like you would on a factory line. And although you can learn craft in an MFA or a writer’s workshop, it can’t actually provide you with something worthwhile to actually say. Art requires input. Sunshine. Experience. Blood. Pain. Revelation. Without that, you have nothing.

The risk of squeezing yourself into a “niche” or overly developing a particular style is that you can become a bland parody of yourself. In the desire to make yourself marketable you become afraid to branch out and experiment. It’s like a martial artist who only punches with their right arm because it feels stronger, but never develops their left, so it continues to shrivel. You rely on your strengths by obscuring your weakness. All the while you will feel pressure to continue doing what people love, but making it different at the same time. What results is often a bloated, weak, insipid version of what originally made you popular - because you haven’t allowed yourself to evolve.

So many artists like to share that “beware of artists” quote. You know the one. “Beware of artists. They mix with all classes of society and are therefore most dangerous.” The truth is most artists don’t mix beyond their own social class. They’re often afraid of people who aren’t like them. Their art reflects this. There is a fear and disdain for the other. You have to go outside of your comfort zone if you want to understand how people unlike yourself live.

In the last few years I've discovered it's not that insane people are drawn to creativity. It's that the interaction with creativity itself is what can make you insane.

Every artist has to go through dealing with people who have an opinion on the direction of their art or how they should craft their "image." Take their advice into consideration, but also don't take it too seriously. It's the job of others to try to sell you, but they don't always understand how you do what you do. If you're not like everyone else, you can't be packaged and presented like everyone else without losing what makes you special. And ultimately, you're the only one who knows which direction you want to go in.

It's easy to create art that deconstructs society. Art that indulges your worst impulses. Nihilism is the joy of destruction, and the expression of our own suffering, unleashed upon the world. It's much more difficult sift through the ash and the rubble of the universe, tongue of the angry sun on your back, and find something worthwhile to celebrate.

Success is not the same thing as popularity. You'll never know the impact of your work or who will be changed by the experience.

Not all art is positive. Some art makes the world worse. Especially art that tells a lie to appease whoever you think might have power over you. A lot of people don’t see a problem with putting on a jester hat to dance for a room of drooling, idiot children who think they’re emperors.

Don't trust any "artist" whose source of income is telling people exactly what they want to hear. If your survival is dependent on a foregone conclusion then you'll feel compelled to be dishonest with yourself.

You only have one lifetime to do something worthwhile. Everything that doesn't get you closer to your goal of being an artist is a distraction. Stop saying "yes" to appease people. Stop doing things you know are just procrastinating. Everything needs to be aligned in the right direction or your likelihood of failure increases exponentially.

Sometimes your art will want to take you into the abyss, and you have to follow. Images that trigger like a gun in the back of your mouth. Venom in your tears. And often before you get to the other side, you'll realize that the thing, that awful thing, that stares back at you from the dark, is your reflection.

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Sit Down and Don't Touch Anything

“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”
― Albert Camus

I always wanted to be a good girl, and I thought that meant I shouldn't touch anything.

The first time I broke a plate in front of my husband my head screamed because I wanted the world to freeze. I stood hesitant and numb, surrounded by the shards, waiting for his reaction. I was expecting to be yelled at, or at the very least, have him be annoyed or disappointed.

He just looked at me and shrugged. "It's okay. It's just a plate. That's what, four dollars?"

That simple moment forced me to rewrite my entire understanding of the universe. I thought I knew the script. I thought I knew the punishment for when my hands and fingers became too big for the environment, when lines intersected in error.

I'd been so used to living in a world where every mistake was a colossal disaster. I ended up in jail as a teenager because of an argument that started when I didn't clean up a Diet Coke spill in the kitchen properly.

All my life I had been too big, too clumsy, too loud, too much. I wore too much makeup, or not enough, or my clothes weren't the right style. My hair was too long or too short. The music and books I listened to weren't the right one. I ate the wrong food in the fridge or I tried to make myself a sandwich at the wrong time, when someone in another room didn't want to be disturbed. I tried to become a little less human every day.

A big reason I became a writer was because it was quiet. In the blind interior of myself I could constrain my motions to my fingertips against the keyboards. I could shift the universe without shifting my eyeballs. I could break myself inside the safe confines of a pair of headphones and a sweater that hid my curves, hide my breath.

I could never be a dancer, or an artist, or a musician. I'd spill out too far. I'd risk extending myself into a space I didn't belong.

And I didn't even belong inside me. My ribcage. My head. My shoulders. They were too big, too ostentatious. I was always apologizing for being in the way. I was constantly paying the price for existing.

I carried my body like I wanted to disappear. If I became small enough maybe I wouldn't have enough gravity to lift a plate to break.

Even when I moved out on my own I was terrified to rearrange the furniture or put a painting on the wall. Windows offended me. Decorations frightened me. I couldn't understand how other people could live with such reckless abandon. How they could so frivolously let their whole selves spill over their living spaces. How they could buy rugs, lamps, little decorations, loud plates, loud portraits, like they were just allowed to belong?

People used to come up to me at work and joke about how bare my desk was. Sometimes they'd even buy me little things so I could decorate it. I'd end up with toys and knick-knacks that I didn't identify with, that didn't feel like me. For several years I accumulated most of my possessions that way. Like I was just another passive object among objects.

For the longest time my greatest fantasy was to be shut in a little closet with a laptop and a desk and a bottle of wine and a dirty naked bulb that swung overhead. I wanted the harsh light to illuminate the ghoulish pop of my fingers against the keyboard.

I wanted to write novels alone until I forgot what the sun looked like.

That is, until the moment nearly eight years ago I broke a plate, and someone observed me doing it, and I didn't fall apart in their eyes.

And in that split second I realized I'd spent my entire life trying to accommodate myself for a lie.

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I was not the cupboard that was supposed to sit still so that it could hold fine China. I was not the column meant to support a greater work of art. I was not the doll meant to be propped up in the corner, with white lace, untouched for a dress, lips pursed but never making a sound.

One of the few benefits to being human is that we're design to manipulate our environments.

For most of existence nature has been an unchanging monolith, unable to modify itself except through cycles of life and death and rebirth that mostly remained the same.

We aren't an aberration. We aren't a mistake. We're nature's answer to the problem of a static existence. We're what nature built so that it could learn what it was like to fly in machines made of metal and soar to the moon.

A good girl doesn't sit in the corner with her hands folded waiting for the dust to cover her eyelashes.

She's meant to make noise, cause trouble, move outside the boundaries. She wasn't built to try to accommodate the world. She was built to push, and pull, and stretch across its landscape.

The toddler tries to put forks in sockets and pull vases off of tables. So the dancer stretches the space where her body can move. She is meant to spill; across the floors, bend an ankle, hit her knee against a stage prop. The artist splashes paint that may hit the wall instead of the canvas.

A good girl breaks the plates. And when she does, so what? The plates were made for us, and we can make more. The mistake was always believing that the possession was more cherished than the error that broke it.

A little noise, a little destruction, is a small price to pay for what she could become.

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