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So the freckle is always consciousness. My personal big bang.
Mum was the orb-weaver spider in those years. And she was the web, and she was the butterfly too, the blue tiger butterfly with sapphire wings being eaten alive by the spider.
Truth is, Bich said, Australian childhoods are so idyllic and joyous, so filled with beach visits and backyard games of cricket, that Australian adulthoods can’t possibly meet our childhood expectations. Our perfect early lives in this vast island paradise doom us to melancholy because we know, in the hard honest bones beneath our dubious bronze skin, that we will never again be happier than we were once before.
The long magic of a human life.
‘I got so intimate with time that I could manipulate it, speed it up, slow it down.
‘These are your sunshine hours and you can make them last forever if you see all the details.’
‘The drop in the lake was Mum’s old man leaving her when she was a kid,’ I say. ‘That’s what starts every ripple of her life.
That’s where Lyle Orlick can stay, maybe. In the air. In my head. In my heart. In my rage. In my vengeance. In my hatred. In my time that will come. In my universe.
There’s no past in it, there’s no mums and dads and no where you came froms. It’s just a choice. Good. Bad. That’s all there is.’
Stop tellin’ everybody else’s story and start tellin’ your own for once.’
the whole point of life is doing things that are right over things that are easy.
it’s nice to think they might have started out with high hopes for our so-called family. Before the bad days. Before they got swallowed up by the universe.
We lie to ourselves, I know, but isn’t there a little white lie in all acts of forgiveness?
