White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

my life could be a party just for me.

Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness.

“Love’s an illusion. It’s a dream you wake up from with an enormous hangover and net credit debt.

I felt just the way Billie Holiday sounded, like I’d cried all I could and it wasn’t enough.

I would be afraid to be so vulnerable. I’d spent the last three years trying to build up some kind of a skin, so I wouldn’t drip with blood every time I brushed up against something.

Despair wasn’t a guest, you didn’t play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy.

There was no limit to the ways in which people could be strange.

You looked away for seventeen years and when you looked back, I was a woman you didn’t recognize.

Don’t cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.

He said you could do anything you wanted to people who didn’t know their history. That was the way a totalitarian system worked.

If I could just stop time. The river and the sky.

A future wasn’t something I could forge by myself out of all these broken pieces I had,

The future was a white fog into which I would vanish, unmarked by the flourish of rustling taffeta blue and gold.

The Buddhist book I’d found on trash day said you accrued virtue just by doing a good job with whatever you were doing, completely applying yourself to the task at hand.