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If you can be nobody, and stand on your own two feet for as long as I have, that’s enough.
no one would bother you, no one would tell you to leave, because they know you’re staying for a reason. That you’re bound by your debts, by blood or sweat
you store these things that no one has ever seen and you go on living like that, your head a coffin to keep memories of the dead alive.
He wanted too much of one feeling—and I guess his heart gave out because of it. I don’t think we’re made to hold too much of any one thing.”
He was locked inside the head of the cold boy in the pine box.
All this, the debris of her living, somehow made her absence feel absolute and stifling. She was everywhere and nowhere at once.
God this line had me right where I hurt, AND right where I love and miss those I’ve loved dearly
“When you’re somebody’s mother, nothing’s good enough. Good and bad doesn’t exist.”
These people, bound by nothing but toil in a tiny kitchen that was never truly a kitchen, paid just above minimum wage, their presence known to each other mostly through muscle memory, the shape of their bodies ingrained in the psyche from hours of periphery maneuvering through the narrow counters and back rooms of a fast-food joint designed by a corporate architect, so that they would come to know the sound of each other’s coughs and exhales better than those of their kin and loved ones.
They, who owe each other nothing but time, the hours collectively shouldered into a shift so that they might finish on time, now brought to their knees in a forest to gather around a half-burnt headrest of a Nissan Maxima on a Tuesday in mid-April, their bodies finally touching, a mass of labor cobbled together by a boy’s hallowed loss—on the clock.
Watching this, Hai felt himself displaced by a wild, untenable gratitude.
