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Human will is a particularly powerful magic. Alchemy happens when a person truly decides something; when a mind is changed.
as soon as she arrived on campus, she felt smothered by the blanket of silence that covered the place.
semiotics
fresh water licking salt,
I already knew how important it is for an artist to protect their time; time, that critical thing required to think and ponder and question and perfect.
Each expendable item a secret way to remind herself of where she was headed. Of what she deserved.
Everything worth doing hurts at least a little bit.
I realized in that moment that this guy’s art form wasn’t sculpture, it was bullshit.
Now, let me tell you about the day that I died.
my life was spent, you see, primarily in my head.
She wondered if perhaps the difference between youth and middle age was not simply having gray hair or stubble but wearing the pretense of having it together.
“The history of art—like culture in general—is really just a big long conversation among creators,”
maybe I see it as less a conversation and more … of a battle.
That was the gift of all this hard work, the chance to shed the skins you never liked too much in the first place.
The smell of finals was, ironically, the smell of fresh mulch being laid, hyacinth and daffodils being planted, freshly sodded and seeded grass.
he wanted his son to have a soft hands kind of life.
that fucking fortune teller at their wedding had been right.
it showed he cared about details.
the only way we’d found to believe otherwise was to wrap ourselves in tiny moments of white validation.
“Like I said, I make them for me,” he said. “It’s worth the paint to tell my truth.”
the two sisters sat watching X-Files reruns into the wee hours of the morning. They were in the middle of the cockroach episode when Toni turned to her sister.
Every day she stared at that different experience—his experience—like it was a Christmas display in a department store.
Because when my art was in the world, so was I. My energy! My spirit!
regret with inaction is just a swallowed apology.
That I was in the past tense.
“Be more compassionate to your mother. Like all mothers, she just tries her best.”
“Be angry at the system, Raquel,” Belinda had told her that day, “and then see how you can fix it.
I saw was the most dangerous thing of all in a man: insecurity. Because they will crawl over and push down anyone around them in their desperate thrashing to find themselves comfortably affirmed at the top.
That missing was normal, that missing was part of the process. That missing, as her mother had reminded her, did not mean mistake.
word sculptures.”
these last months taught her that nothing was yet set in stone. There were always second chances and unexpected opportunities, and if you were willing to stay open to them, new ways of seeing things.
she was beautiful and deserved beautiful things.
Life’s never simple for women like us—women who won’t just get with the program; women whose minds and mouths race faster than the world can keep up with.
