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If you can’t sleep when everyone else does, you’re not even human.
There was this boy I was friends with at grammar school, named Mark. He and I just stood around, watching everybody, not even speaking except for a word here and there. People saw us together, and they all decided Mark would be my husband. They made jokes, or winked at us, or sang this gross song.
Everybody says it’s normal for girls my age to have intense friendships with other girls, which might even feel like something else. Some childish echo of real adult love and courtship. But you’ll know when it’s time to abandon this foolishness, the same way you know when to eat and sleep. I close my eyes and imagine that when I open them again I will have outgrown all of my feelings.
Every time I think I know what’s wrong with me, I find something else.
She always said it was her safe place. That was a long time ago, but maybe anyplace that’s truly safe can’t ever disappear.
As these things go from being “moments that I need to survive right now” to “things that will always have happened to me,” I start to shiver.
In a city, you could only walk in circles. Trouble knew where to find you. People lived with more things than they could carry, and they pretended that built structures were geographical features.
Discovering a new phobia was like the opposite of falling in love.
“It’s how they keep everybody in line,” said Alyssa. “Everybody’s so busy trying to get enough of all the different kinds of money, nobody has time to stop and think.”
Part of me is still waiting to finish telling the joke I started blurting out in the basement of the Zone House. As though time halted in the midst of that one syllable, and has never found a way to resume, no matter what the calendar says.
My life feels wrong, but good. Maybe that’s the best I can do.”
“Part of how they make you obey is by making obedience seem peaceful, while resistance is violent. But really, either choice is about violence, one way or another.”
Everyone in Xiosphant was weirdly polite, just as long as you pretended all their made-up stuff was real.
The whole purpose of arresting me and hauling me away, with so much fanfare, was to put fear into people. So why be surprised that the fear is in me?
“People here are not accustomed to seeing economic disputes settled with guns, but every economy runs on bullets, one way or another.”
I feel like saying, Nobody is ever safe, but instead I smile and say, “Of course.”
“I don’t deserve a friend like you,” Mouth said. She laughed. “Nah. It’s more like, I’d be a shitty friend if I gave you what you deserved.”
She was running out of time—and depending on other people was worse than tasting your own digestive fluids.
“You can’t hide from the people you care about. A love that hides is already halfway to becoming regret.”
That’s not the version we were taught in school, and it makes me wonder what else we were taught that nobody else believes.
there was something about your sleep patterns syncing with another person’s that felt like intimacy.
I can count on a few fingers the number of humans who have cared for me as much as these night-dwellers seem to.
small tureens that smell like hot rat stew, but also like liquor.
The smell was better than the taste: like air from a cloistered orchard, where nothing bad could happen.
I wonder if Argelan has a word for when you get what you’ve always wanted, but it’s still not right.
I keep remembering how she said she would burn the world for me, and I’m so ready to set at least a few small fires—together.
but it only bothers me if I pay attention to it.
Maybe you don’t get to choose how you make peace, or what kind of peace you make. You count yourself lucky if peace doesn’t run away from you.
What kind of city is this? They have enough resources to spare for light shows and sour cherry drinks, but not enough to rescue the people living in a shantytown at the edge of evening. Every self-satisfied chuckling face I pass, I want to scream into.
They both loved to hear themselves talk about theoretical questions of how many teeth make a bite.
I stand, frozen, as everyone studies us. I’d much rather be on the edge of the night, receiving the Gelet visions and learning about all the spaces beyond the narrow road, than be stuck trying to impress these people.
“I don’t know if I survived or not. I feel like part of me never came back from the Old Mother. Like I’m here, but I’m also still there, too.”
“Everything that’s wrong with us now started on the Mothership.”
But now I feel the same way as when I flew off the edge of the Old Mother. Like there’s no bottom to anything, and I could just fall forever. Maybe all this time, I’ve been lonely for people who were never even born, or a culture I never got to know.
Time passes, even when you can’t see it,
I remember how I held her on the Sea of Murder, when death seemed so close that I could say anything. The storm battered us, wrecked our sense of balance, until I thought the skiff would shatter under our feet. That’s become my happiest memory.
“I wish I had been enough for you.”
You can figure out why this person is connected to you. Or you can join forces with them, and cause trouble for everyone else.
At some point, I stopped thinking of this as a disguise, and started just taking comfort in anything that makes me easier in my skin.
“I can’t do this thing anymore, where we live in a tiny space and pretend it’s the whole world.
All my rage has petered out, and instead I just feel a sadness so violent it’s like wings beating inside me, harder and harder, until they snap.
“I am going to be walking away from that fire for the rest of my life,” she said, and this was something she had never admitted to herself before. “My hair could turn to white silk, my skin could turn to dry leaves, and I would still be walking with my back to the flames that consumed what was left of my people. I’m not ever going to be Argelan, or Xiosphanti, or Gelet, or any other nationality.”
They couldn’t understand us, but they took our machines apart, and our technology told a story about people who never quit building and killing.
According to River, Jean wasn’t depressed just because of the chronic pain, but because everybody treated her different.
You might mistake understanding for forgiveness, but if you did, then the unforgiven wrong would catch you off guard, like a cramp, just as you reached for generosity.
You can find the ones who have nothing to lose, who have learned to listen with both ears so they can know when the powerful will come down on them next.
Nothing will change, unless more humans learn to be like me. I remember the climate projections, and the rising trend line. We can’t fix this problem in my lifetime, or even several lifetimes, but we need to start now.
to join with others to shape a future is the holiest act. This is hard work, and it never stops being hard, but this collective dreaming/designing is the only way we get to keep surviving, and this practice defines us as a community.
When we first became friends, and Bianca used to pull the forgotten history books out of the back of the library at the Gymnasium, this act of revealing a different past seemed to me a magical power. But now I keep wondering if there were books she chose to leave on the shelf, which talked about all the crimes of saviors, like the Hydroponic Garden Massacre. Maybe if she had read deeper, things would be different now.
“I can’t believe you didn’t actually change anything.”
