Tegan (Slant Postscripts)

“In fact I need you to know it was all true. The friendly guy who helps you move and assists senior citizens in the pool is the same guy who assaulted me. One person can be capable of both. Society often fails to wrap its head around the fact that these truths often coexist, they are not mutually exclusive. Bad qualities can hide inside a good person. That's the terrifying part.”
― Chanel Miller, Know My Name

“Today, finishing this, I am feeling better, but perhaps, tomorrow, I will not. That is okay. It is okay not to feel better. It is okay not to produce art. There is so much pressure, in narrative, for us to 'recover', to reach 'catharsis', to find 'resolution', to 'speak out'. I offer resolution here because I have found it, but that resolution is as much truth as sleight of hand, a conjuring trick. I may never manage to 'resolve' what has happened to me. In naming it, I have learned to live with it, and this in turn breaks a pattern of suffering. Naming is, for me, a magical act: it is a way of saying daily, I am alive. I have harnessed naming to bring order to chaos. Naming maps experience into history. Contains, within it, a legacy and a lineage: it offers up a spectrum of thought. But naming cannot undo what was done. Hope, for me, is found in the telling.”
― Jessica Cornwell, Birth Notes: A Memoir of Recovery

“What Am I to Write?

What am I to write for you?
Blank page,
White emptiness,
Broken words are not enough
Nor spluttered ink spat out in ignorance,
Contemptuous of its desire to mark
And maim,
Indulges so at first,
And then again.
But No
I will not take to mediocre ways,
Nor overplay the passion song in muse,
For the heart well tuned
Needs not the head
To pump its life,
And the arteries awakened to the rhythm,
Subtle rhythm,
Should suffice.”
― Iona Matheson, In Retrospect

“Witch. The word slithers from the mouth like a serpent, drips from the tongue as thick and black as tar. We never thought of ourselves as witches, my mother and I. For this was a word invented by men, a word that brings power to those that speak it, not those that it describes. A word that builds gallows and pyres, turns breathing women into corpses.”
― Emilia Hart, Weyward