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self-possessed.
dispossessing,
“Don’t give them any more rope to hang me with than they already have.”
wounded
appetite for unconventionality.
We understood that the dissolution of Mother’s family was the inauguration of ours.
The two could not exist together. Only one could have her.
Ain’t nothin’ funnier than real life,
coalescing
“You may as well take a broom and start sweeping dirt off the mountain,”
somehow made us both feel small.
erratic.
“People want a miracle,” she’d told me. “They’ll swallow anything if it brings them hope,
compulsively,
The seed of curiosity had been planted; it needed nothing more than time and boredom to grow.
“Beauty’s everything,”
a goose among swans.
tiny harlots.
despondency,
This speech would stay with me in a way that a hundred of its precursors had not.
They weren’t really stories at all, just one tangent after another.
It felt like throwing dice, like the roll was out of my hands.
God would score the toss.
found it impossible to defend myself from the strange noises that constantly invaded.
as if their immorality might be catching.
shibboleth
I’d chosen it because I’d heard of Shakespeare and thought that was a good sign.
devout,”
stilted.
“When you chop a chicken’s head off, you shouldn’t smile because you might get blood and feathers in your mouth.”
Just be happy, okay?”
“Read the textbook” turned out to be excellent advice.
tongue-tied.
I had started on a path of awareness,
never again would I allow myself to be made a foot soldier in a conflict I did not understand.
my missteps came from ignorance, not intention,
apartment meeting.
I devised a bizarre and ever-evolving rubric by which I measured his love for me, and when he failed to meet it, I became paranoid.
Her temperament was compliant.
testing his control.
fatalism.
recoiled
my brain had adjusted to its shocks.
I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.
premonition
subtlety of a bulldozer
disease is not a choice.
Why did you fight so hard against made-up monsters, but do nothing about the monsters in your own house?
I reveled in his disinterest.
Grandpa was a quiet man, near silent.
