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“I’m dead here in the city. Everybody is, we’re all walking corpses. I have to get out of here to find out whether I can still be alive.
Look at Flaca: loving a woman so openly, under a broad blue sky. The high of it. She’d watched it play across Flaca’s face. She wondered whether she, Romina, would ever know what that felt like. To love so openly even for a minute of her life. And if the chance did come, would she be able to take it? Even if the other two miracles fell into place—a woman who would love her, and a place where she could love—would she have it in her to love back?
“That your hands on me are like food. And I didn’t know I was starving.”
comfortable saying nothing that it sometimes seemed he’d never break it at all, as though silence were a precious thing to be kept whole. It was new to her, this sort of silence, not corrosive at all, but warm and solid, like a quilt shared on a winter night.
Scared to leave. Scared to stay. She hovered in the space between fears.
She wasn’t like her classmates, with their dreams of becoming a doctor or teacher or rich man’s wife. Her only ambitions were to live and to be free.
That’s how it was. How the world was. Even when loved, you were never fully seen.
“Well, thank goodness you make her sing. What’s a life without music?”
People like us are never safe, not even in a place like New York, the heart of empire. Safe is never given. Safe is what you make with your own hands.
Flaca found Virginia’s writings to be brilliant, intimidating. Here was a woman who cleaned houses for a living and whose mind burned as fiercely as the sun.
“Suffering has no measure. There are no scales to weigh it. There is only sorrow after sorrow.”
It was a lie that time healed all wounds. A vicious lie. Some cuts never seal right, and the best you can do is layer things over them—noise, days, love like a false skin—and turn your attention anywhere and everywhere else.
release, away from all that, into the ocean, the living ocean, the great blue arms of the only one she knew would never hate her, and she’d been planning for so long that she had no right to be surprised at the willing coil of her knees, the forward leap, her legs obedient and ready. Still, the air shocked her as she hung aloft, suspended so gracefully that it seemed for an instant that she’d been freed from the rules of gravity, that she wouldn’t fall after all, that the sumptuous night would hold her in its embrace forever,
Romina had come to see secrecy as a kind of poison that eats people’s lives from the inside, all the more so when it festers into shame.
Ocean as church, she thought. Woman’s body as church.
