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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tahereh Mafi
Raindrops are my only reminder that clouds have a heartbeat. That I have one, too.
It’s like a negligent parent who only knows one half of who you are. It never sees how its absence changes people. How different we are in the dark.
it’s nearly impossible to beat gravity when no one is willing to give you a hand.
The new citizens of our world will be reduced to nothing but numbers, easily interchangeable, easily removable, easily destroyed for disobedience. We have lost our humanity.
Truth is a jealous, vicious mistress that never ever sleeps,
Hope in this world bleeds out of the barrel of a gun.
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.
Hate looks just like everybody else until it smiles. Until it spins around and lies with lips and teeth carved into the semblance of something too passive to punch.
Hope is a pocket of possibility.
“Go to sleep.” “Go to hell.” He works his jaw. Walks to the door. “I’m working on it.”
My body is a carnivorous flower, a poisonous houseplant, a loaded gun with a million triggers and he’s more than ready to fire. Touch me and suffer the consequences. There have never been exceptions to this rule.
Possessive is not a strong enough word for Warner.
You don’t know it yet, Juliette, but you are a very bad girl,” he says, clutching his heart. “Just my type.”
“You I would kill for pleasure,” he says to Adam. “But Juliette is the one I want forever.”
For the first time in my life, I walk forward because I want to, because I feel hope and love and the exhilaration of beauty, because I want to know what it’s like to live. I could jump up to catch a breeze and live in its windblown ways forever. I feel like I’ve been fitted for wings.
I wondered if she’d seem different; if she’d shatter the expectations I’d already formed in my mind by simply having a normal conversation. But watching her talk to someone else made me crazy. I was jealous. Ridiculous. I wanted her to know me; I wanted her to talk to me. And I felt it then: this strange, inexplicable sense that she might be the only person in the world I could really care about.
I’ve come to believe that the most dangerous man in the world is the one who feels no remorse. The one who never apologizes and therefore seeks no forgiveness. Because in the end it is our emotions that make us weak, not our actions.
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.
I haven’t felt like laughing in so long. And I can’t help but be amazed at the power such small, unassuming animals wield over us; they so easily break down our defenses.
He’s kissing me like he’s lost me and he’s found me and I’m slipping away and he’s never going to let me go.
Kenji is a walking paradox of Unflinchingly Serious Person and 12-Year-Old Boy Going Through Puberty all rolled into one.
Kenji is kind of like that. He’s like glue. He works behind the scenes to keep things together
I can see what’s in their eyes because I’m beginning to remember what it feels like. Hope. It’s like a drop of honey, a field of tulips blooming in the springtime. It’s fresh rain, a whispered promise, a cloudless sky, the perfect punctuation mark at the end of a sentence.
“You’re so lovely when you’re blushing,” Warner says to me. “But I really wish you wouldn’t waste your affections on someone who has to beg for your love.”
“You can go to hell,” Adam shouts at Warner. “Just because I’m going to hell,” Warner says, “doesn’t mean you’ll ever deserve her.”
“Books,” he’s saying, pulling his boxer-briefs up and rezipping his pants, “are easily destroyed. But words will live as long as people can remember them. Tattoos, for example, are very hard to forget.” He buttons his button. “I think there’s something about the impermanence of life these days that makes it necessary to etch ink into our skin,” he says. “It reminds us that we’ve been marked by the world, that we’re still alive. That we’ll never forget.”
“Warner isn’t your name,” I point out. “Your name is Aaron.” His smile is wide, so wide. “God, I love that.” “Your name?” “Only when you say it.”
He looks at me. Really, really looks at me. “You’re going to go on to do incredible things,” he says. “I’ve always known that. I think I just wanted to be a part of it.”
But I’ve developed a strange, frightening faith in who Warner really is and who he has the capacity to become. I want to find the 19-year-old boy who would feed a stray dog. I want to believe in the boy with a tortured childhood and an abusive father. I want to understand him. I want to unravel him. I want to believe he is more than the mold he was forced into.
“No one has ever looked at me like you do,” he whispers. “No one ever talks to me like you do, Juliette. You’re different,” he says. “You’re so different. You would understand me.
“Listen to me,” Warner says, urgently now. “You must understand—the only people who matter in this wretched world are the ones with real power. And you,” he says, “you have power. You have the kind of strength that could shake this planet—that could conquer it. And maybe it’s still too soon, maybe you need more time to recognize your own potential, but I will always be waiting. I will always want you on my side. Because the two of us—the two of us,” he says, he stops. He sounds breathless. “Can you imagine?”
“I want you,” he says. He says “I want all of you. I want you inside and out and catching your breath and aching for me like I ache for you.”
“You—you said you wanted f-friendship—” “Yes,” he says, he swallows, “I did. I do. I do want to be your friend.” He nods and I register the slight movement in the air between us. “I want to be the friend you fall hopelessly in love with. The one you take into your arms and into your bed and into the private world you keep trapped in your head. I want to be that kind of friend,” he says. “The one who will memorize the things you say as well as the shape of your lips when you say them. I want to know every curve, every freckle, every shiver of your body, Juliette
“I want to know where to touch you,” he says. “I want to know how to touch you. I want to know how to convince you to design a smile just for me.” I feel his chest rising, falling, up and down and up and down and “Yes,” he says. “I do want to be your friend.” He says “I want to be your best friend in the entire world.”
“Please.” He says “Please don’t shoot me for this.” And he kisses me.
Aaron Warner Anderson, chief commander and regent of Sector 45, son of the supreme commander of The Reestablishment. He has a soft spot for fashion.
“It’s not charity,” I snap. “He cares about me—and I care about him!” Warner nods, unimpressed. “You should get a dog, love. I hear they share much the same qualities.”
“You deserve so much more than charity,” he says, his chest heaving. “You deserve to live. You deserve to be alive.” He’s staring at me, unblinking. “Come back to life, love. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
Words, I think, are such unpredictable creatures. 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.
“Excuse me?” “You’re perfect,” I tell him, so overcome I forget myself. “All of you. Your entire body. Proportionally. Symmetrically. You’re absurdly, mathematically perfect. It doesn’t even make sense that a person could look like you,”
Kenji pulls up next to me. Nods at Warner. “So this gets you going, huh?” I’m mortified. Kenji barks out a laugh. “I’ve never seen him in sweatpants before.” I try to sound normal. “I’ve never even seen him in shorts.” Kenji raises an eyebrow at me. “I bet you’ve seen him in less.” I want to die.
“This isn’t about Adam or Warner,” I tell him. “This is about me and what I want. This is about me finally understanding where I want to be in ten years. Because I’m going to be alive, Kenji. I will be alive in ten years, and I’m going to be happy. I’m going to be strong. And I don’t need anyone to tell me that anymore. I am enough, and I always will be.”
“You don’t love him at all?” Warner asks me. My voice is being stupid. “Romantically?” He nods. “No.” “You’re not attracted to him?” “I’m attracted to you.” “I’m serious,” he says. “So am I.”
And we are quotation marks, inverted and upside down, clinging to one another at the end of this life sentence. Trapped by lives we did not choose. It’s time, I think, to break free.
“I love you,” I whisper. “I love you exactly as you are.”
“Lift your hips for me, love,”
It’s a heavy, unbelievable kiss. It’s the kind of kiss that inspires stars to climb into the sky and light up the world. The kind that takes forever and no time at all.
“Aaron,” I whisper. “I love you,” he says. My heart no longer fits in my chest. “Everything looks so different to me now,” he says. “It feels different. It tastes different. You brought me back to life.” He’s quiet a moment. “I have never known this kind of peace. Never known this kind of comfort. And sometimes I am afraid,” he says, dropping his eyes, “that my love will terrify you.”
He leans into my ear. Lowers his voice. “Ignite, my love. Ignite.”
“I want you to know,” he says, pulling on the zipper holding this suit together, “how much I value your friendship.” The seam is coming apart and my skin is now open to the elements; I bite back a shiver. The zipper stops at the base of my spine. “But I’d like you to reconsider my title,” Warner says. He drops a soft kiss in the middle of my back. Runs his hands up my skin and pushes the sleeves off my shoulders, leaving kisses against my shoulder blades, the back of my neck. “Because my friendship,” he whispers, “comes with so many more benefits than Kenji could ever offer.”
