Only the Pretty Lies

by Rebekah Crane

It’s much easier to idolize the dead. The living constantly fail us. But in death, we remember a person as near perfect.

a true kind of witch, before men took control of the word and made it ugly. A witch with long brown hair streaked with gray, and strong pale hands, and eyes the color of twilight,

Whatever song I wrote, whatever notes and chords and riffs I put together, could never equal the genius of the albums I’d grown to love, and to play. My own ideas and thoughts were incoherent most days, so far from brilliant they verged on ridiculous. Embarrassing, really. No, it was much easier to play someone else’s genius.

I like my life as it is. It’s a good life. It would take a lot of convincing to give that up for the uncertainty of a pencil in my hand and a blank piece of paper.

Most people think that by telling the truth, their lives can go back to the way they were. But that’s a lie. What was can never be again. The truth creates a whole new reality. And until someone is ready to confront the truth, it’s better to just keep your mouth shut.

“I know my brother, Jay. River’s not a bigot.” “Bigotry isn’t a disease, Amoris. You don’t just have it or not have it. It’s something you participate in, whether you like it or not. Excusing people for bigotry only makes it worse.”

The hardest thing to dig out of a muscle is honesty. Honesty requires change, and most people don’t have time for that. They just want the pain to go away for a short time, so they can keep moving forward.”

And maybe that’s how it goes—you fix the little things until one day you wake up and everything has changed. You look in the mirror and you don’t recognize your old broken self anymore. Or . . . you keep fixing the little things, and suddenly you wake up one day and the little things still break down, and you’re still in pain, and nothing has changed.

Zach factored me into all the changes he has planned. But me—I’ve eliminated him without his knowing.

My limbs are numb, and my brain is a mix of fog and complete awareness. Like nothing makes sense and yet everything makes sense, but when it actually comes to speaking the truth of the universe, it gets caught in my head and only gibberish comes out. If only a person could see into my brain, all the world’s problems would be solved. But that’s the irony of weed.

“I don’t think it behooves us to draw racial lines,” Mr. O’Brien says. “That only sets back progress.” “I didn’t draw the lines,” Jamison says. “But I’m forced to live within them. You can’t just go around erasing realities when it benefits you, Mr. O’Brien.”

I’ve rarely noticed the turning points in my life. They’ve been more like curves, gentle changes of direction that, only after time has passed, I look back and see as times of change.

“Why do you want to write books so badly, Jay?” “So people will see me.”

“When did love become something a person deserves? Love is a human right, not a reward for good behavior.”