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“What are you doing here, honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.” And it was then Cecilia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: “Obviously, Doctor,” she said, “you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”
“Basically, what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality.
When she jumped, she probably thought she’d fly.”
We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.
We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn’t give a damn about lawns.
Acts like these—simple, humane, conscientious, forgiving—held life together.
the planets shifted a few inches each day, and it was clear, if you looked up, that the earth had turned its blue face away from the sun, that it was sweeping down its own dark alley in space, over where cobwebs collected in the ceiling corner, out of reach of the janitor’s broom.
She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.
