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I was 10, maybe 11, and I remember this unpleasant recurring feeling I’d get every few steps like I was waking up and waking up and waking up.
He fell in love with her instantly when she was a kid. Not in a perverted way, but he just knew. He waited for her to grow up and then he married her.
How coy of Mom, how opaque to communicate with us in this way, to demand that we guess what it was she was trying to say, like she was Sylvia fucking Plath.
I could never afford to be strange because I had people depending on me. Being weird is a luxury.
It’s a rite of passage for all Southern whites, you either open your eyes and deal with the fallout, which I should say is an ongoing process, or keep them shut, which is maybe more convenient, but also infinitely more difficult.”
This is how I’d like to die, death by dick, mind totally blank.
She said she did not want to get better. And, that if she wanted to be dead, she should have the right. I cleared her of this misconception. She does not have the right. Not in the state of Louisiana.
It must have been horrible for him to create me and then lose control of the narrative in this way.
It’s easy to say now that I wish I’d been kinder to my sister, but at the time I don’t think I was capable of it. Our father had just broken my heart, our mother had just killed herself, and I had just set myself on fire. I couldn’t afford to be generous.
Rose looks at me anxiously, waiting for me to smile back. I do, but I wish she’d stop handing me a knife to cut her with. It’s only a matter of time before I’m not able to resist.
Can you imagine every time you try to swim being stopped by someone else’s organs?
