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“The way you look at something changes what you see,”
If you didn’t want the same result over and over, you had to do something different.
I like getting to be the me now watching the past me. It’s almost a way of loving myself. Stroking the cheek of that girl with my understanding. Smoothing her hair in my mind’s eye.
“Applebee’s,” Shyanne said, “so dress nice but not too nice.”
“Hush,” Rose said, and picked up the little dog. “This is Biotch, and she is very, very old. Aren’t you? Aren’t you a little old bitch?”
Words can be made hollow, and once they are hollow, anything can be done with them.”
The sadness from the morning didn’t exactly go away; it dried on me and slowly crumbled, leaving me covered in little flakes, like if you eat a glazed donut in a black shirt. That was how it was being a grown-up. We were all moving through the world like that, like those river dolphins that look pink only because they’re so covered in scars.
She wasn’t trash—no human being was trash. Jesus had said that. Jesus, who consorted with lepers and prostitutes.
But good or evil, every single dollar was power. Power to hire a lawyer, power to control how she spent her time, power to change her appearance, power to command respect. Power to be who she wanted to be.
“You can’t tell me that if it was men and a medical decision would result in their penis splitting open and them not being able to hold their pee for the rest of their life, they wouldn’t think that should be their own decision.”
And it really makes you wonder: What kind of truth would require this many lies to tell?
I think the things we make up in our heads, the assumptions we make, wind up being much worse than what’s really going on.
Love was not something, I realized, that came to you from outside. I had always thought that love was supposed to come from other people, and somehow, I was failing to catch the crumbs of it, failing to eat them, and I went around belly empty and desperate. I didn’t know the love was supposed to come from within me, and that as long as I loved others, the strength and warmth of that love would fill me, make me strong.
