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LIKE LOVE, war’s a bloody mess when it’s happening, and a worse mess when it’s over; but with any distance, you can look back at either and see only the glory, or only the pain.
There’s always a terrible waiting period, a purgatory of doubt, between the suffering and the grace. That’s the lonely alone work, weathering the places in between, and dismantling oneself piece by piece meantime, shredding all that can be shredded, returning to dust all that can be eroded. Amazing grace appears when all faith has fled; when final exhaustion has set in; when there’re no trails to follow and one carries on anyway.
the way a life fully led will take you out of your way and beyond your control.
They were the expectant inheritors of land and power from their parents; no one talked about the wars that had gone on in pursuit of that land and power, although that war hadn’t left us, I can see that now. It was in our fragility, our anorexia nervosa, our confusion. It was in the manner in which we averted our gaze from the discomfort and chaos and destruction we were causing.
we were the half-life of our white supremacist violence, the aftershock of colonialism.
I’d been hurt, I’d get over it, or I’d get used to it. And the sooner I realized it wasn’t meant for me, this suffering, the sooner the suffering would end. It wasn’t personal; none of it, no suffering was, really.
We were a whole nation of traumatized children; or the rural kids were; we didn’t have sparkling pools and tennis courts like the city kids did, the white city kids, I should say. We performed a childhood gutted of innocence. And the circumstances were what they were.
