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adolescence like some long-standing illness we all suffered.
“[The girls] 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.”
The details held the truth hostage, preventing any meaningful exchange.
“We decided the girls had been trying to talk to us all along, to elicit our help, but we’d been too infatuated to listen.”
What the boys have been calling love is actually something closer to estrangement.
The boys might as well be calling for themselves; no one will ever answer.
“Obviously, Doctor,” she said, “you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”
“That girl didn’t want to die,” she told us. “She just wanted out of that house.”
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.
Lux’s promiscuity was a commonplace reaction to emotional need.
is dullness a gift? intelligence a curse?
The sadness had started long before. Before America. The girls had it, too.”
“You never get over it,” she said. “But you get to where it doesn’t bother you so much.”
“I sleep all the time.” “And yet you’re still tired?” “Yeah.”
the world was pure emotion, flung back and forth among its creatures,
girls traveled in their imaginations
It is speaking to us. But we can’t hear.
Inside their house they were prisoners; outside, lepers. And so they hid from the world, waiting for someone—for us—to save them.
But then she came closer and we saw the light in her eyes we have been looking for ever since.
In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.
“All wisdom ends in paradox,”