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Zev didn’t have any friends besides me, that whenever I saw him at a party or lecture, he was always alone. He sought me out because he had no one else to talk to, because no one else could stand him.
My ex core
Zev that felt exciting to me, a cold, bitter exterior I was determined to crack.
Me w my evil ex core
It occurred to me briefly that this might be the last first day of school I’d ever have.
then, I still believed beauty conferred a kind of moral superiority and
Wilder, New Hampshire, a town with only one bar, that was no small thing.
Debra and Kelsey had love and security to spare, and they shared it with me freely.
this made me miss my friends
“We think our stories are personal,” he told me, “but we’re all products of our time.”
do you think you fell out of a coconut tree?
I let his language wash over me and, after a while, felt it wriggle inside, burrowing in like earthworms.
My mother found it shabby and depressing. “Too many Jews,” said Abe.
Lol ??
Men admire each other when they are at their best, but women enjoy meeting each other in pits of despair.
and i live by that
needlepoint designs my mother used to make that looked so perfect from the front, but when you turned them over, you could see every knot and string.
as small and unimportant as I mostly felt, the egotism of youth hadn’t left me, and I placed myself firmly and squarely at the center of the universe.
We need women. Somewhere along the way the balance shifts and all these boys you pine for now become men who are very afraid of being alone.”
penetrating questions,
I bet
(Later, I would know this implicitly. I would pass young women on the street and see that they were all beautiful, even the ones who weren’t.)
slowly at first and then all at once,
@carina
MY NEED TO link sex with secrecy was born that spring.
“You sound just like your mother, talking about your art, thinking everything will work out. But you won’t have me downstairs working to pay for everything.
“so you remember that it’s okay to want things.” She made me promise never to sell it.
“Well, it’s a job and I need a job.” I pouted, but inside I was thrilled.
Pine
s/o bolo
“Each time you happen to me all over again.”
Because what we have is extraordinary.”
OMG i hate him
At twenty-two, I still believed adults did things because they made sense, that they had information I did not have, by virtue of being adults. I was beginning to think this might not always be the case. I would soon come to understand that adulthood was exactly this: the constant upending of everything you believed when you were young.
realized that no matter what he had done to me, I would always be the one unpacking that night, wondering what I might have said or done differently.
as graduation drew near it felt like everyone was my friend.
Yeah
When I was older, I would learn that there were other men like him, men who would bandage your wounds and make you dinner and hold your injured hands across the table. But at twenty-two, I thought he was the only one, and
the end embedded in the beginning in a way I hadn’t. It was how adults behaved, I knew now, and I would never again not see the world in the same way.
We take our decisions with us, no matter how much we wish we could leave them behind.
I’d never stopped wanting things that weren’t mine.
The phone rang twice more, then a woman answered and I told her what I knew.
I believed—I chose to believe—that his death had been an accident. But what was clear was that Igraine would have died if the police hadn’t found her when they did. She
“I’m sorry you went through that,” she said when I was finished. “I’m sorry I wasn’t a better friend to you.”
But here, I could taste the possibility. There were other ways I could live. There were other people I could be.
Why did I believe Connelly when he told me I was special, but not my father?
Abe had never been allowed to have dreams of his own and so he focused on mine.
Real
