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Another person’s past spreads out like a vast sea, impossible to grasp in its entirety; all you get is brief glimpses of the things hidden down in its depths, the things you drag up one by one to examine before throwing everything back.
“I don’t even know his last name,” he says. “Then invite Harmony over for dinner tonight and ask her,” she says, crossing her arms. “I bet she knows.”
Still, something about her makes Olive feel uneasy. Like she’s not as benign as she’s pretending she is.
Olive imagines a needle pushed into her chest, pinning her to a display case, the label below her: LESBIAN. It doesn’t hurt, exactly. It’s more like something inside her is spilling out through the hole that’s opened up, and it’s kind of exciting and mind-boggling.
THE DECODE MEDIA OFFICE is on the eighth floor of a generic building in a neighborhood of San Francisco that a few years earlier was known for its transients and nightclubs but now features a dozen blindingly new office buildings and luxury condo towers, with more on the way.
All memoirs are lies, even those that tell the truth. They can’t help it, because the longer we live the more our fixed pasts keep changing. And yet he doesn’t even have a narrative to seize on anymore; he can’t get a grip on his own protagonist.
She can feel herself vibrating around the edges again, as if her molecules are in motion, ready to tune in to whatever the world is sending her way today.
That sense of life as an endless cornucopia, yours for the taking. All the time in the world.
You believe what you think you believe, until suddenly, you realize that you don’t anymore. Or maybe you do believe, but it’s no longer convenient to do so, so you decide to forget. You decide to find other beliefs, ones that more comfortably fit the constantly evolving puzzle of your life.
It’s a truth, it’s his truth; and if he’s learned anything by this point, it’s that truth can be subjective.
like mounting a butterfly on a board and assigning it a classification and a taxonomy, fixing it forever in place. I conveniently forgot that you can’t really do that with a person.
“I don’t know if I’d say girlfriend, exactly.” She’s still getting used to this, being out, her gayness just another normal facet of life. She imagined that transferring to a new high school midway through junior year would mean she’d been granted a blank slate; a chance for reinvention. But the funny thing was how little she felt like she’d changed—as if there really always was something innately Olive, something that she hadn’t been able to pinpoint before. (She’s
Out here, the crickets are starting to chirp. The night is clear and cold, a half-moon pressing down on them from above, stars visible over the pale glow of the urban grid.
The porch light behind Olive casts her shadow out toward the street, as if illuminating a path forward. She senses her life expanding, on the verge of dividing into two, into three, into a hundred divergent directions. Any one of them a choice that might preclude any other; any one a possible dead end. How will she ever know if she went the right way?
the barren fields of granite casting ancient fingers toward the sky.
She knows how to lean into pain; it’s just another challenge to conquer, proof that you’re alive.
has found herself standing at the kitchen sink looking out at the twilight, just waiting for something to happen, feeling the emptiness around her like a suffocating blanket.
the confidence that she needed nothing more than a fit body and a sharp mind—now seemed like a rifle shot across the bow of an incoming battleship.
She was going to get old. Things were starting to end for her rather than begin.
just as the birds began to stir in the garden outside, an unexpected moment of clarity:
THE NIGHTCLUB IS A temple, devoted to the sacred worship of indulgence.
Covet this life, for it is the best life, and we are #blessed.
