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Kindle Notes & Highlights
As he forcefully speaks of good energies, as though willing them into the space, he seems to grow while we three seem to shrink. There is no room for questions. He tells us things we never asked.
admire this woman. She is gutsy and she can articulate everything that my mind coils around. But in the past year, I have found my anger about things I once found important diminishing. I find her sense of incredulity and injustice about these things now exhausting.
I would feel myself dissolving a little, unsure how to create sharp, real contours around my own day.
Suddenly, every interaction between every single person in the world felt so heavy. Everyone had these needs and thoughts churning, every single day, and I didn’t understand how you were supposed to keep up with all of it.
he held my hand and said he understood, and told me it would happen, but that because I overthought everything it would take a long time.
One night I stood in the middle of a supermarket aisle, surrounded by all the cans and all the information bubbling away in streams in my brain about which brand killed dolphins, and which brand used open harvesting, until I felt weighted with too much responsibility to decide, and was close to tears when he found me.
Everything was powder pink and bendy and shiny for us. We hadn’t had time to build a lasting memory around some fixture and then watch time fall away from under us. The phrase ‘remember when . . . ’ did not yet have a place in our conversations.
It’s not the city’s fault, I say, it’s just that there is too much here. I feel crushed. I can’t breathe with all these memories everywhere.
The truth about getting older, she says, is you just spend more time watching the same streets and missing people that used to be in them with you.
And while Niki talks about her passive-aggressive boss, and updates me on her sister who she was just talking with on the phone, she will reach across and squeeze my hands and give a small smile, and I will eat the hot buttery pasta and nod and let her talk, because listening to a person who is a part of the day-to-day world can be one of the most comforting things.
The rest of the world had already started to swirl around me by this stage; I had begun to feel out of sync with my twenty-something peers and more in tune with the elderly, the schoolchildren, the unemployed, the sick, anyone who dared to walk at an abnormal pace.
Sami says he thinks this is why it is important to celebrate small wins along the way. He says if we don’t take the time to do that for every small act we have managed, no matter how small or insignificant it might seem to the outside world, well, only then is it sad.
I tell her that things are longer and less inclined and smaller to change than we think they will be and we need to give them time.
The language of a city is all around us if we choose to read it. Call it what you want: hauntings, ghosts, or memories, they are the same thing.
I heard once that you start to feel a kinship for a place when you have lost a loved one in its soil, and so, ashes to ashes, I am bound to this sunburnt land.
