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What was I raised on—fairy tales? Not this kind. These are the fairy tales we were supposed to be teaching our daughters. A few thousand years ago, we did. But we got sloppy and complacent, and when the Old Ones seemed to go quietly, we allowed ourselves to forget the Old Ways. Enjoyed the distractions of modern technology and forgot the most important question of all. Who the fuck are you?
Men. Dude, they suck.
“Damn it, would you just cooperate?” “I do not know that word, ‘cooperate.’ “ “Obviously,” he growls.
“Revenge,” he says softly. “They took too much. You give up and die, or learn how to take back. Revenge, Mac.” I cock my head. I try the word on my tongue. “Revenge.” Yes. That is what I want.
“Don’t leave me.” I thrash in the sheets. “I’m not, Mac.” I know I am dreaming then, because dreams are home to the absurd and what he says next is beyond absurd. “You’re leaving me, Rainbow Girl.”
Who the fuck are you? With an explosive inhalation, I snap upright in bed, and my eyes fly open—like coming alive after being dead and interred in a coffin. I am Mac. And I’m back.
“So, how did he look at me?” “Like it was his birthday and you were the cake.”
Don’t confuse intensity of emotion with quality of emotion, baby,
Pain is not love, Mac. Love makes you feel good.
“Who wants to go back?” I said coolly. “I want to go forward. And if you’re always looking over your shoulder, worrying about the next step you’re taking, you can’t. Hesitation kills.”
One of the primary tenets of the course was that highly successful leaders kept journals, morning and night, in order to stay tightly focused on their goals.
Life didn’t explode in the sunshine and pretty places. Life took the strongest root with a little bit of rain and a whole lot of shit for fertilizer. Although love could grow in times of peace, it tempered in battle.
Did it ever occur to her that sometimes a willingness to turn dark for someone else might just be a fucking virtue?”
Nana gave me a look that suggested I might just be too stupid to live.
Was that what life did? Made you lose everything you cared about and believed in, then killed you?
Regardless of how many people I surrounded myself with, no matter how many friends and family I loved and was loved by in return, I was alone at the moment of being born and at the moment of dying. Nobody came with you and nobody went with you. It was a journey of one.
“You think it’s good to have something like me obsessed with you? My dear, dear, bloody idiotic, suicidal Ms. Lane, you have no fucking idea what’s gotten the scent of you in its nostrils, what has the taste of you in its blood, or you’d run. You’d run for what little remains of what you think of as your life.”
I suspect reality is a bit less tangible, more frighteningly malleable to fiction writers.
