More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 30 - February 21, 2023
EVEN WORTHLESS THINGS can become valuable once they become rare. This is the grand lesson of my life.
Because that’s what a sister is: a piece of yourself you can finally love, because it’s in someone else.
That’s how fickle fate is. One day you wander instead of climbing, and you end up rich and happy. One day you don’t, and you’re me. Or you’re drained outside like 175. Or you’re left bloodied and naked, facedown in the dirt on a world that isn’t yours, like the girl whose bed I sleep in. Fate breaks rough, most of the time.
If I figured anything out in these last six years, it is this: human beings are unknowable. You can never know a single person fully, not even yourself. Even if you think you know yourself in your safe glass castle, you don’t know yourself in the dirt. Even if you hustle and make it in the rough, you have no idea if you would thrive or die in the light of real riches, if your cleverness would outlive your desperation. This is a lesson
What they don’t tell you about getting everything you ever wanted is the cold-sweat panic when you think about losing it. For someone who’d never had anything to lose, it’s like drowning, all the time.
was so concerned about getting fired, I’d forgotten that anyone can die, at any time.
wonder if you feel it less, with guns. If so many people are killed with so little effort, is it easier to pretend they aren’t lives? That everything is fine? It’s different, I imagine, from seeing flattened forms like blood ghosts on the sand or hearing the screams in the streets during the parade. No, killing should take longer than a heartbeat. Murder should be unignorable, always.
There is comfort in the inevitability. It makes my part in her story unremarkable. I didn’t change her fate; I don’t have that power. My presence just changed her timing. We were always going to separate. We must always separate. Time is a flat thing and we are always separating. When we are together we are already gone.
As I leave Exlee reminds me to say Jean’s name each morning and each night until the burial, because our dead are only weights on our backs when we won’t let them walk beside us, when we try to pretend they are not ours or they are not dead.
