Kindle Notes & Highlights
Every wildfire, I feel safe and I don’t feel safe. I care and I don’t and this is my California.
I tune out. I realize that it’s unfathomable to me to be on either end of that kind of conversation. Of that kind of relationship. I am not a father. I am not a daughter. I am not my father’s daughter.
My phone rings, but it takes me a minute to place the noise. The last time I heard that ringtone was when I picked it from the settings. It’s my mother. Run, I think, like there’s another fire on the other side of the phone.
We’d all laugh because we wanted her to be funny.
She’s never been much of a talker and neither have I. It’s not uncommon for us to sit here in silence for the entirety of a visit. I both love this and feel like I’m failing her.
By now, I’ve stopped panicking. I stop trying to treat the nosebleeds. I like the way the blood feels as it leaks from my nasal cavity into the back of my mouth.
Frontline is a rerun, which is fine because nostalgia is all I have room for.
Rather than longing to feel something so powerful myself, I mostly just wished someone felt that way about me.
I think I knew this wasn’t just my dad going out to the store or to work in the garage. Not from anything he said, because all they did was look at each other, clipped goodbyes in low voices that carried a marriage’s worth of shorthand.
I wonder if she also blamed me, because I am a part of my mother in the same way that my mother was a part of her. It’s confusing, this ancestry of pain and blame.
It was three years ago but it’s supposed to be over by now. It’s not supposed to have been three years since I held a regular job.
She will react with a whispery gasp, “Oh honey,” and I will take pleasure in manipulating it out of her: the secret undermining of my mother.
I want to take a big breath exactly as much as I want to stop breathing.
I try not to wonder where her insecurity comes from. For thirty-five years, have I made her feel like she needed to work to get to that place, how it’s supposed to go between mothers and daughters? Do I hold all the power? She’s the one being a mother, and just waiting for me to hold up my end of the bargain and be the daughter?
One day, will another granddaughter receive another old box of remnants—of junk—from a life that didn’t work out? All the ways we bequeath our failures.
Now I wonder if she was just looking away the whole time. I wonder if that’s how she survived.
“I’m sure she has a long list of things to hate me for,” he says. “Don’t add to the list just because the list is there,”
It’s just that I gave up on so many things that afternoon and church was the easiest. Church was the first to go. Well, the second, I suppose. First was my dad.
I want to be fed.
It’s not a smell of home. It’s a smell of somewhere else, something else, someone else. It’s a smell of longing. It’s a smell of lacking.
I think about when she sat with me on the stairs after my dad left the first time, temporarily, and she must’ve been so sad but she didn’t take care of her own sadness, she took care of mine, but I hated what had happened so much that I couldn’t separate it from her.
I couldn’t come up with a single memory that showed my mother as batshit crazy. The only things I could come up with showed that it was all my fault.
What was the point, then, in dying, other than clearing out all the people who didn’t think like us?
Nothing ever happened to make us like this, nothing beyond the relentless drain of being us, surviving my father, surviving my teenage years, surviving, surviving, surviving.
I don’t know what I believe in, and with alarming clarity in that moment, as a child, I realized I never knew.
I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just doing.
it’d take me years to figure it out, but it was shame, more than anything. I felt like my emotions were wrong. I shouldn’t be happy to see him because I was supposed to be mad that he’d left.
It’s not that we all stopped talking. It’s just that we only said the things that didn’t matter.
do not wish to see myself more clearly.
The people who raise us, not the places, lay out our futures for us, piece by piece.
