The Colony

by Annika Norlin

Unfortunately, I don’t feel that my pasta puttanesca adequately compensates for the state’s betrayal.

Sleeping with Roy. A surge of stress just thinking of Roy. To spend the night with him, I would need to go to the gym, lose weight, be sharp. Roy hadn’t reached out at all since my burnout.

I wished someone was with me. Everything that happens here is so silly, yet there is no one to laugh with. And then it’s like it never happened.

there was a pain so great it couldn’t be comprehended. So great it would swallow you whole if you got too close. He slept with one eye open.

Life-and-death events have an ability to rip people right open. They were wide open now. They dove right in, both of them. And the place where they met was so intensely intimate that it seemed impossible to go back from there; everything was different, nothing else was enough. If in everyday life, at work, you meet at level 2, in a close conversation with a trusted friend at level 4, in a sexual act with someone you love, afterward, you find yourself at level 5— then Sara and József, in a matter of minutes, had climbed straight up to level 6.

Sex can be as many things as a conversation. A game. A bandage. A shrug. A party. Yoga? Violence. Something purely physical, almost like exercise. Bragging. People seeing each other. One seeing the other. If you are lucky: a bond.

The ease with which she navigated life, everything she had been through; nothing seemed to leave any lasting scars on her—experiences were always positive, a good story to tell.

He had nothing at all! The framework around him was gone, shattered the moment his mother closed her eyes. Staying here for a while to catch his breath, find solid ground beneath his feet. It wasn’t worse than anything else. In the midst of a hurricane, you have no view of the future or the past. And a person who has no goal can’t chart a direction either.

Before things have happened, it always feels impossible that they would. If you had seen from the beginning which way things would go, you would have pumped the brakes from the start. But one day turns into the next and, without much thought, it becomes a life.

You look at one another and see others doing the same things in the same way and you think ah, this seems to be a way of existing.

the desert island principle regarding romantic selection. According to the desert island principle, humans above all crave love, or sex, and will find ways to make this happen regardless of the circumstances. This means that most of us change our perception of what is attractive based on the available options.

Everyone has three personalities, minimum. One in real life. One on the internet. And one when you are drunk.

who is truly the loneliest, someone who lives far out in the middle of nowhere but is lumped together with people, or someone who interacts with hundreds of people every day but refuses to let anyone under their skin.

It’s just a shame that as soon as my thoughts even touched on my place of work, or writing an article and receiving comments on it, my nervous system started firing on all cylinders again. I was genuinely afraid of the thought of working, as though a phobia had developed. That simply being there would be harmful to me.

“As human beings, we make so many small choices every day that we forget we also have the ability to make big choices. We don’t have to live where everyone else lives. We don’t have to live like everyone else lives. We can sit down and ask ourselves: what do I truly believe in? And then you try to live that way, with people you actually want to live with.”

Maybe we can move like a herd of animals, drawing strength from other people, but not asking too much.”