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“Eleven is a terrifying age,” she says. “I remember nothing before I was eleven, but then there it was, all color and horror.
She’s like dough, how the give of it beneath kneading hands disguises its sturdiness, its potential.
realize the world will continue to turn, even with no people on it. Maybe it will go a little faster.
I believe in a world where impossible things happen. Where love can outstrip brutality, can neutralize it, as though it never was, or transform it into something new and more beautiful. Where love can outdo nature.
“People can be monsters, or vulnerable as lambs. They—no, we—are perpetrators and victims at the same time.
You fight to put names on all of your dead, but not every victim wants to be known. Not all of us can deal with the illumination that comes with justice.”
What disease is sawing off this branch of the family tree?”
When did my child sour? I didn’t remember the process, the top-down tumble from sweetness to curdled anger. She was furious constantly, she was all accusation. She had taken the moral high ground from me by force, time and time again.
by loving me when I did not love her, by being abandoned by me, she has become immortal. She will outlive me by a hundred million years; more, even. She will outlive my daughter, and my daughter’s daughter, and the earth will teem with her and her kind, their inscrutable forms and unknowable destinies. She will touch my cheek like I once did Cal’s, so long ago, and there will be no accusation in it. I will cry as she shuffles me away from myself, toward a door propped open into the salty morning. I will curl into her body, which was my body once, but I was a poor caretaker and she was removed
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I believed that my wife loved me as I was, but I had also become certain that she’d love a more relaxed version of me even better.
there was nothingness. Not the absence of a thing but the presence of a non-thing.
Every adult and speaking animal in that story was suspect—having either not taken proper care of the protagonist or actively sent her into harm’s blundering path.
“It is my right to reside in my own mind. It is my right,” I said. “It is my right to be unsociable and it is my right to be unpleasant to be around.
What is worse: being locked outside of your own mind, or being locked inside of it?
have you encountered any others who have truly met themselves? Some, I’m sure, but not many. I have known many people in my lifetime, and rarely do I find any who have been taken down to the quick, pruned so that their branches might grow back healthier than before.
