If I Had Your Face

by Frances Cha

I wanted to reach over and shake her by the shoulders. Stop running around like a fool, I wanted to say. You have so much and you can do anything you want. I would live your life so much better than you, if I had your face.

Most people have no capacity for comprehending true darkness, and then they try to fix it anyway.

He is a person who expects people to be kind because he is kind.

That was what was most important to me. At the time.

because people are allowed to change‼️

He loves the story that he saved me.

And I could tell that the men who chose her were the types who wanted to punish her for looking like that.

I wish I could invite one or more of them over, but that would require me to possess an entirely different personality. I wish I could tell them that I empathize with them, that we are the same. I want to tell them I was given up by my mother too.

“What I mean to say is, I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “And not somewhere else.”

In a way, I will be glad when we are almost home and the scenery will turn into rice fields and farm plots, and I will be reminded of how far I have come, instead of what I cannot reach.

“Your life is over, you psycho bitch.” It’s from Bruce, of course. From the next room, a lifetime and a universe away.

SOMETIMES, WHEN HE is holding me and I feel like I am liquid in his arms, I wonder if anything else in my life will seem real after this. It is as if I traveled beyond the earth and reached out and touched a burning star, and it is both unendurable and terrifying.

I AM GLAD, then, that I will never love someone again in this way. I would not survive a second time.

the best art comes from an unbearable life—if you live through it, that is.

It is an easy thing, keeping elders happy. All you have to do is smile wide and say hello and thank you and goodbye with deep earnestness.

IN A WAY, I think I am now experiencing true freedom for the first time in my life. That is the way to think of this—that this is karma, and also absolution.