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“I expected you to be more surprised,” Cyrus admitted. “My being straight passing or whatever.” “Oh sweetheart,” Gabe chuckled, “you think you’re straight passing?”
She thought he looked like a fruit. She joked they should name him “Bademjan,” the Persian word for eggplant. “We can make eggplant stew. He will be best friends with a tomato.”
On this night, Cyrus had read a poem early, an older experimental piece from a series where he’d been assigning words to each digit 0–9, then using an Excel document to generate a lyric out of those words as the digits appeared in the Fibonacci sequence: “lips sweat teeth lips spread teeth lips drip deep deep sweat skin,”
I like it
A martyr wears simple footwear,
Fajr was always my favorite of those prayers because it was so short, only two rakats. The whole experience of the prayer fit tidily into the span of a single dream, a fifteen-minute sleepwalk into surrender, obedience, God, whatever. Smart, I thought, for God to demand prayer from his servants while their minds were still gummy with dream, while the partition between our world and his was thinnest.
The iron law of sobriety, with apologies to Leo Tolstoy: the stories of addicts are all alike; but each person gets sober their own way.
one day I will be only gently and barely dead,
then. All that grief consolidated, concentrated into a single hard point. Like a diamond. That one day.”
(Zee had joked that a hotel’s fanciness was directly proportional to how long it took you to figure out how to turn on the showerhead)—when
Everything green just farms us, Cyrus thought. Feeding us oxygen and eating our corpses.
It’s easy for people who have sacrificed nothing to rationalize their own ordinariness by calling me lucky.
As heaven spins, I fall into bedlam.
He understood, with a clarity that had until that moment in his life eluded him, that he was not at all made for the world in which he lived,
