cherry

“...most days, a keen, gray energy (this deadened sort of voltage--something of the faux-sophistication, low-grade restlessness, and, in that she often had the urge to stop walking and curl against a building and sleep there and freeze to death, a passive-aggressive sort of suicidal despair) would move through her (though some afternoons around her, uncertainly, like she might be in the way, and then she'd just feel indistinct and hungry).”
― Tao Lin, Bed

“He walked out into the night, thinking languageless thoughts...He ran suddenly across a street. At night, he knew, there could be the belief that something never before felt might be felt, something new. You could allow yourself quite easily this view of the world--this thrilling, midnightly faith--of there being something out there that loved you, that, at night, worshipped and searched for you, like a past life seeking its next, wanting desperately the continuation of itself. And though it would probably never find you, it would also, you believed at night, never give up, and this was enough--that something was out there and desperate and on its way.”
― Tao Lin, Bed

“There was a rumor that year, that you might not be yourself. That you might actually be someone else. One of those people who refuse antidepressants, who can't hold down a job, who ends up sleeping, finally, in a hole.
That might be you, was what the rumor said.
People talked. They said, 'There's this rumor...' Then they pointed out something amusing that was happening in the distance. They shrugged. Itched their forearms. They were easily distracted. Later on, though, in the mouthy dens of their bathrooms, they looked in their mirrors, and they just were not sure. Someone was there; but was it them? And so they believed. They said things like, 'What does it even matter. I might not even be myself.' Then they threw themselves off a bridge, or else drank a quart of ice coffee and watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.”
― Tao Lin, Bed

“This wasn't sadness--there were no feelings of desperation or disaster, nothing like depression with its one slowed-down realization of having been badly and untraceably misunderstood--but rather a plain, artless form of loneliness; something uninteresting, factual, and teachable, perhaps, to children or adults, with flashcards of household items (toothbrush, pillow), coloring books of fleeting, unaccompanied things (hailstones that melt midair; puddles formed and unseen and gone; illusions of friends in the periphery), and a few real-world assignments (post-nap trip to the pet store in the early, breezy evening; Halloween night asleep on the sofa; Saturday night dinner in the parking lot, looking through the windshield at the pizza buffet restaurant you just got take-out from).”
― Tao Lin, Bed