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anxiety she had about coupling could’ve only been made worse by the garbage we’ve all been eating all our lives, every piece of fairy-tale cake we’ve choked down that rewards a girl—for her kindness, her wit, her courage—with a wedding.
“So I walk into this karaoke bar, still eating my falafel,” Lila said. “It was so good, salty and rich, crispy and soft, like deep-fried freedom and truth and acceptance. It tasted like the known, owned self. It tasted like fuck you, patriarchy.
always come away with the impression that he doesn’t understand I exist. I mean, I don’t, functionally, exist for him. He doesn’t have to deal with anyone who looks like me or thinks like me or lives like me—I guess lived like me—and what he doesn’t already know, he can’t imagine, so I might as well be—nothing.”
Maybe this was how adult friendships happened: by accident, embroidered over time, visible only from the height of years.
She could hear Dex: See, Tuesday? Not all humans in groups are a bad thing. She supposed groups of collaborative nerds were an exception.
he’d found the fine-art nerds both delusional and charming; they legitimately believed they were creating objects meant to last. Performance, by comparison, had always felt more authentic. Performance was alive, so performance had to die. A piece or a song or a play was designed to last for only as long as it took to perform, to begin and end and echo in the mind.
He was never in more danger than when he allowed himself to be most himself. When he was most himself, he ran the constant risk of being entirely Too Much.
It was important to see what could happen to people, to see that people could be put back together. And part of putting people back together was reminding them that they weren’t alone. No matter how much they thought they wanted to be.
