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A sad woman is a blade hanging over the world, threatening to fall at any moment.
She had believed education was a surefire way to a better life and had passed that belief on to me. She ended up a junkie on a dirty sofa and living off scraps and claiming she could hear angels. I ended up in a bar waiting for a junkie who was going to give me a job. Whoever invented that story about education being the way out of the gutter deserves two bullets to the back of the head.
the tightness in my chest reminding me some holes fill up with the kind of pain that turns into concrete and forever prevents you from putting anything else in there.
Not all white people have the same level of privilege, but they all share an aversion to being forced to step momentarily into otherness.
Anyone who talks to you about someone else will talk to someone else about you, you know what I’m saying?
Her face was covered in deep lines, tiny dry riverbeds of experience.
The thing about humanity is that it’s always worse than the worst you can imagine. We are base, vile creatures rutting in the muck we’ve created, our eyes looking up at a poisoned sky we’ve populated with ghosts to help us sleep at night, to allow us to come up with reasons to do the things we do. I immediately knew my silent inaction in that small, dark room would haunt me. None of us are as brave as we think we are.
Maybe the money would mean a second chance. What people with money don’t understand is that most poor people’s problems can be solved with money. There are problems that won’t go away no matter how many bills you throw at them, but for people like me, for folks whose nightmares have names like hunger and eviction, money is a wonderful thing that can make tribulations disappear in a matter of seconds.
I lived for glimpses of towns past their expiration date where cracks, ghosts, and memories outnumber residents. That’s the real America. The soul of this country lives in the gap-toothed smiles of gas station cashiers, the matted fur of small-town dogs, the buzzing of neon signs in small dives where a layer of dust covers every surface, the shattered spirit of drive-through employees in nowhere towns, the weird smells and carpet stains in cheap motels where the windows look out at empty parking lots.
Men often complain about women because they know how to hurt us with words. We do the same. I think the only reason we complain about women is because they do it better.
She was fighting the way we all fight. We come into the world fighting, covered in blood and crying, and we go out fighting disease, calamity, age, or exsanguination. The point is we need to fight. Always. Giving up is never an option.
Revenge is one of the motors of the world. We want to punish those who hurt us. At least everyone I know does. Yeah, some say you need to turn the other cheek, but that only comes from those who haven’t been smacked hard enough.
