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You turn in surprise to receive what someone has left for you, but you don’t refuse it. Bodies don’t work that way—a person hands you something, you take it. A reflex. You worry about what it is later.
The face that stares back at you from the mirror later in life is so different than when you’re young.
I never much understood the point of the world of men. How they fed off each other. How they motivated themselves. I mean, I got the purpose, but I navigated that world the way an astronaut would an alien landscape. Trying not to breathe the same air. Which was impossible, of course.
“Those of us who are different know the world better, know it how it truly is. We can’t edit out parts of it. The horror and the beauty most ignore. When your senses are acute, you can’t escape. And you see the disconnect we have from … everything.”
Usually, a message wasn’t passive. Usually, on some level, a message so dramatic called out for action. But Silvina hadn’t asked for anything. Except, I thought, to follow the clues.
Left the mystery alone, did not tug on the string of it. But, all the while, the string was tugging at me.
“Work toward a better world, but never forget what world you live in.”
The weather had turned a sour lukewarm with pockets of chill, unfamiliar for the season. Glittering gutters. Tinkling gurgle of water passing through shards of ice.
All the faces around me felt so gray and featureless. Scentless bodies, rapt, in the falling-apart banquet chairs, lashed together like life rafts, in row after row.
One place had become a kind of sad “man store,” devoted to hair-care products and aggressive-looking outdoor gear for the faux tough who never went camping.
It wasn’t that I suddenly became sober. It was that I was exuberantly, profoundly drunk.
had another problem: the go-bag. I didn’t want to leave it in the trunk of the car. That felt like mixing sanctuaries or solutions. It needed to be separate—the whole reason I’d stored it at the gym.
Drove through a grid and grief of traffic so predictable it lacerated me now, when I wanted to go fast and reckless. We all expected the slowness, even if it didn’t slow us down. All of our minds drifting there together alone.
“We’re ghosts trapped in the wreckage of our systems. So why shouldn’t we haunt them? Why should we not avenge ourselves upon them? Why be merciful?”
When you find the world you live in unfamiliar, alien, it’s nothing to slip into another.
Langer came across as a special kind of head case. Some weird strain of altruism an overlay on his sociopathy.
I couldn’t process the smells, the dry and the moist of them, how there was a brackish scent of the sea and marsh. A hint of forest. Of how where they came from clung to them.
You never know every part of yourself because you never encounter yourself in all situations.
the only way we save ourselves is to get to the end faster.
“No one gets to decide who god is anymore.
Impossible to tell how fast society was collapsing because history had been riddled through with disinformation, and reality was composed of half-fictions and full-on paranoid conspiracy theories.
