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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tahereh Mafi
Read between
December 5 - December 5, 2022
Talk to me every once in a while. Find me a cure for these tears, I’d really like to exhale for the first time in my life.
Truth is a jealous, vicious mistress that never ever sleeps,
I never wanted to hurt the only person who never wanted to hurt me.
They’re going to kill me. I always wondered how it would happen. I wonder if this will make my parents happy.
Death would be a welcome release from these earthly joys I’ve known.
I didn’t want the clothes or the perfect shoes or the expensive anything. I didn’t want to be draped in silk. All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.
In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.
His gaze is fixed on me: calm, unflappable; 2 buckets of river water at midnight. I’d like to cry into his eyes.
My eyes are 2 windows cracked open by the chaos in this world.
His voice hugs the letters in my name so softly I die 5 times in that second.
Killing time isn’t as difficult as it sounds. I can shoot a hundred numbers through the chest and watch them bleed decimal points in the palm of my hand. I can rip the numbers off a clock and watch the hour hand tick tick tick its final tock just before I fall asleep. I can suffocate seconds just by holding my breath. I’ve been murdering minutes for hours and no one seems to mind.
Hundreds of thousands of seconds pass and I can’t stop dying.
My heart is a field of lilies blooming under a pane of glass, pitter-pattering to life like a rush of raindrops.
The sun and the moon have merged and the earth is upside down. I feel like I can be exactly who I want to be in his arms. He makes me forget the terror I’m capable of.
Things are getting too comfortable and I’m beginning to panic.
I want to drown in ignorance. I want to be stupid, dumb, mute, completely devoid of a brain. I want to cut off my own limbs.
I’m a cumulonimbus existence of thunder and lightning and the possibility of exploding into tears at any inopportune moment.
His eyes are two shots of green punched through a pane of glass. Cutting through me.
“Laughter comes from living.” I shrug, try to sound indifferent. “I’ve never really been alive before.”
His eyes are a midnight moment filled with memories, the only windows into my world.
My face is in his hands and my lips are at his lips and he’s kissing me and I’m oxygen and he’s dying to breathe.
I tuck caution in my pocket and hope I can reach for it if I need to.
This pen is my only outlet, my only voice, because I have no one else to speak to, no mind but my own to drown in and all the lifeboats are taken and all the life preservers are broken and I don’t know how to swim I can’t swim I can’t swim and it’s getting so hard. It’s getting so hard.
It’s like there are a million screams caught inside of my chest but I have to keep them all in because what’s the point of screaming if you’ll never be heard
Because the truth is, I am nothing but a coward.
And some days I wonder why I insist on keeping myself alive.
Every day I feel sick. Empty and somehow aching. Love is a heartless bastard. I’m driving myself insane.
26 letters are all I need. I can stitch them together to create oceans and ecosystems. I can fit them together to form planets and solar systems. I can use letters to construct skyscrapers and metropolitan cities populated by people, places, things, and ideas that are more real to me than these 4 walls.
Once they’re gone, I’m left to look around and be alone with my thoughts. It’s a dangerous place to be.
It’s hot rain and humid days and broken thermostats. It’s screaming teakettles and raging steam engines and wanting to take your clothes off just to feel a breeze. It’s the kind of kiss that makes you realize oxygen is overrated.
Synonyms know each other like old colleagues, like a set of friends who’ve seen the world together. They swap stories, reminisce about their origins and forget that though they are similar, they are entirely different, and though they share a certain set of attributes, one can never be the other. Because a quiet night is not the same as a silent one, a firm man is not the same as a steady one, and a bright light is not the same as a brilliant one
Loneliness is a strange sort of thing. It creeps up on you, quiet and still, sits by your side in the dark, strokes your hair as you sleep. It wraps itself around your bones, squeezing so tight you almost can’t breathe. It leaves lies in your heart, lies next to you at night, leaches the light out from every corner. It’s a constant companion, clasping your hand only to yank you down when you’re struggling to stand up.
And even when you’re ready to let go. When you’re ready to break free. When you’re ready to be brand-new. Loneliness is an old friend standing beside you in the mirror, looking you in the eye, challenging you to live your life without it. You can’t find the words to fight yourself, to fight the words screaming that you’re not enough never enough never ever enough. Loneliness is a bitter, wretched companion. Sometimes it just won’t let go.
Our eyes meet for less than a second but I could swear he smiled at me, his cheeks slapped into pinks and reds by a wind jealous of his wandering eyes.
Sometimes I wonder about glue. No one ever stops to ask glue how it’s holding up. If it’s tired of sticking things together or worried about falling apart or wondering how it will pay its bills next week.
Maybe it’s because he’s broken and I’m foolish enough to think I can fix him.
“On the darkest days you have to search for a spot of brightness, on the coldest days you have to seek out a spot of warmth; on the bleakest days you have to keep your eyes onward and upward and on the saddest days you have to leave them open to let them cry. To then let them dry. To give them a chance to wash out the pain in order to see fresh and clear once again.”
feelings I captured with a tortured mind and hammered into sentences I shoved into paragraphs, ideas I pinned together with punctuation marks that serve no function but to determine where one thought ends and another begins.
I do not fear loneliness.”
I taste metal in my mouth as I lie. “I’ll be okay.”
No gun, no sword, no army or king will ever be more powerful than a sentence. Swords may cut and kill, but words will stab and stay, burying themselves in our bones to become corpses we carry into the future, all the time digging and failing to rip their skeletons from our flesh.
But though we’ll know forward and we’ve known backward, we will never know the present.
