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My story was maltreated. The words were too wrong and ugly to speak.
The thing about women from the river is that our currents are endless. We sometimes outrun ourselves.
Indian girls can be forgotten so well they forget themselves.
He said, “You don’t need to be nice.” My mother said that was when I became trouble.
Storytelling. What potential there was in being awful.
I learned how story was always meant to be for Indian women: immediate and necessary and fearless, like all good lies.
Despair isn’t a conduit for love.
It’s too ugly—to speak this story. It sounds like a beggar. How could misfortune follow me so well, and why did I choose it every time?
I left because I was hungry.
the human condition was misery. I’m a river widened by misery, and the potency of my language is more than human. It’s an Indian condition to be proud of survival but reluctant to call it resilience. Resilience seems ascribed to a human conditioning in white people.
She transcended resilience and actualized what Indians weren’t taught to know: We are unmovable. Time seems measured by grief and anticipatory grief. I don’t think she even measured time.
Story is inhuman and beyond me, and I’m not sure you ever recognized that.
He was almost jaundiced—he was so sick in love with me.
The man I had been conditioning was not happy with me. He knew something was wrong, and that’s when I wondered if maybe falling in love looked like a crisis to an observer.
“I’d burn my life down for you,” you said. There was still so much to tell you—things too ugly to know or say. I wanted to know what I looked like to you. A sin committed and a prayer answered, you said.
Safety wasn’t familiar—not with men. Our life felt brighter together.
Our culture is based in the profundity things carry. We’re always trying to see the world the way our ancestors did—we feel less of a relationship to the natural world.
Sometimes grief is a nothing feeling.
You will always love me in a shadow.
I guess heartbreak is simple.
I’m going to die an Indian death. I want to lay my neck on the cool steel alloy of the train tracks back home. I want the death of a rez dog. Mutts can’t keep away from the tracks.
Feel culpable in my insanity because you are partly to blame.
Do you still love me? I still want you. Don’t think less of me for being crazy. Don’t think that I am the only one culpable in my craziness.
I need help, and I cannot stop thinking that every transgression has brought me closer to a light, a striking beacon that tells me death is absolution. I have never chosen light. Do you consider me a transgression?
We called it “Indian sick,” and it was the first illness to be accounted for. It begins with want, with taking, and ends with a silence that hurts and makes us beg.
I am familiar with death, and I remembered it was heavy to hold.
Nothing is too ugly for this world, I think. It’s just that people pretend not to see.
It feels like a skill to refrain.
You said you love to failure. I made you full and flushed. You loved me until your body failed your will.
You don’t appreciate that you’ve broken me. Lovers want to undo their partners. I feel unveiled and more work than you had bargained for. I was unsure of the currency of men and unaware that losing myself would feel so physical.
I don’t like neat narratives
In white culture, forgiveness is synonymous with letting go. In my culture, I believe we carry pain until we can reconcile with it through ceremony. Pain is not framed like a problem with a solution. I don’t even know that white people see transcendence the way we do. I’m not sure that their dichotomies apply to me.
I think self-esteem is a white invention to further separate one person from another. It asks people to assess their values and implies people have worth. It seems like identity capitalism.
“Men will never love you,” she said once. “They’ll use you up, and, when you’re bone dry and it’s your time to write, you’ll be alone without a goddamn typewriter to your name.”
The gravity of Indian women’s situations, and the weight of our bodies, are too much.
The strange thing about poverty is that maintaining a level of desperation and lack of integrity keeps the checks rolling in.
Children are teachers.
We should have wanted for simpler things, but in many ways my mother taught me love was divine—like a hermitage or vision or picking from the tree of knowledge. Mother didn’t like the Bible, but I appreciate it for how suffering is related to profundity.
The pain was a process to understanding.
The language was always wrong. Even in this account I can’t convey the pulse of her.
She always fell asleep with a book on her chest. It was the illumination of living light.
Sometimes suicidality doesn’t seem dark; it seems fair.
When you told me that I want too much, I considered how much you take.
I told him that I was not finished loving you.
I don’t think that I am lonely. I think that I am starved and maybe ravenous for the very thing you withhold from me.
The therapists reiterate that when I’m suicidal nobody is beholden to me. You have the right to walk away. I don’t understand, though, why you would look at me the way you did.
I often have felt, in proximity to their violations, that I mimic their chaos.
I told her that I don’t believe you’re a hindrance, and that I am not prideful in love.
part of what makes me a good person is that I can be struck by emotion.
Some things seem too perfectly awful.
