Laurel C

“My whole life I had believed that understanding myself required me to keep others at a distance, lined up on the far side of a river. That evening of counting I had not felt so certain. That evening I felt like a room with doors open, for others to explore, and that from their explorations I could start to ascertain my shape. We are not the people we think; we cannot really see who we are. Here, on Sunday in San Francisco, I had the same impression: that I might unfasten the locks and lower the draw-bridge; that I might not be a fortress but a space for others to pass through.”
― Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born?

“Ever since my friendship with Niki I think of the anecdote as a form of chronic illness that attaches itself to some people; that compulsion to tell everything in the shape of a story, to turn life into a formula meant to captivate, impress, upset, or inspire laughter. An anecdote is a sealed box that cannot yield anything other than more sealed boxes until every party to the conversation - or the
"so-called conversation" as Niki would put it - sits there with their own pile of sealed boxes, mentally obstructed, tied to the mast, and with the anecdote next in line tugging at their attention.”
― Ia Genberg, Detaljerna

“Early on in our friendship we'd explored the possibility that we were in love, but those feelings had soon subsided and made space for something much more enduring, a multiyear conversation that went round and round, a true love without claim to ownership, a bracing pact in the face of every new circumstance in our respective lives.”
― Ia Genberg, Detaljerna

“outside our family ... she was able to tame [her anxiety] into the range of what's considered normal. This lifelong undertaking, the effort to make her instability seem normal, was her life's great struggle, the great stipulation for being touched by the love of others.”
― Ia Genberg