Status Updates From Notes on an Execution

"The question is how we face what you have done, the chaplain continues.
The question is how we ask forgiveness.
Forgiveness is flimsy. Forgiveness is like a square of warm sun on the
carpet. You’d like to curl up in it, feel its temporary comfort—but
forgiveness will not change you. Forgiveness will not bring you back."

"Jenny would only shake her head, wise and wistful, so resigned in her faith. There has to be a purpose, she would say. Pointless pain isn’t human instinct. We’ll always find meaning in it.
Optimistic, you’d say.
It’s not optimism, Jenny would tell you. Just survival."

"With an inch of hair left—just like Emma Watson, the stylist
exclaimed—Hazel looked like a little boy. Like a nymph, or a fairy from
one of Alma’s bedtime stories. A bit, yes, like Emma Watson. Transfixed by
her reflection, Hazel imagined she had lived her entire life as this
unrecognizable human, that she had always known this slim stranger face."

"Hazel would always know these things about Jenny—the details, the habits, the tiny gravitations...details did not make a person...Jenny’s details would change.. Jenny would create a new iteration of her half of the whole, shaping herself intentionally into something fresh... Here Hazel was, burning with the familiar urge to follow, to keep up, and, eventually, to surpass."

"It had never been more obvious or more embarrassing: Hazel was
sheltered, privileged, ignorant by default. Luis often poked fun at her for it.
You white girls always have it good. It seemed impossible that a concept as
violent as that word—homicide—had latched on to Jenny, her own sister"

" For the first time in her life, Hazel looked at Jenny and did not see herself at all. A stranger would never stop to ask: Are you twins? The fact struck Hazel with an acidic devastation, her mouth already unbearably sour from the highway."

"Her mother’s face was awed, ecstatic. Unraveled proud. It was exactly the way she used to look at Jenny"

"Rarely, during this time, did Hazel think of Jenny. She remembered that
period tenderly—a stretch of months during which she did not feel Jenny
and Jenny did not feel her, when they spoke intermittently on the phone,
grazing only the surface details.
They were the best months of Hazel’s life."

"Hazel caught him so many times that night, looking dead-eyed over Jenny’s shoulder. His smile melted instantaneously off his face the second he did not need it—he held Jenny with a rigid back and a shallow happiness, impermanent...One day, she would wear a white dress, too. She would stand across from a very different man, a good man who felt everything in vivid color—and she would know exactly how he loved her."

"In the rare moment she found time to reflect, Hazel tried to revel in the
chaos and motion, the fierce existence of the world she had so deliberately
created."

"gazed out at the flat expanse of the neighborhood. It was placid as ever, the sky a blank autumn blue. The calm seemed unfair, nearly taunting."

"Right then, you made the promise. You would be normal. You would be
good. You took the memories of that summer, and you balled them up,
shoving them deep into the crevasse of your unruly body. The sight of her
arching back would dissolve those Girls, somehow erase them. You would
offer yourself up to her sly, teasing grin, her soft fawn eyes—you would
hand her the microscope."

"Of course I still love her, you said. But the good parts of the story are
nowhere near the end.
You decided, then, to go back to the beginning."

"The desperation is intentional, maybe the most important part of this exercise. It is why they made you wait for years, then months, now hours and minutes, the whole of your life transformed into a countdown. The point is this. The waiting, the knowing, the not wanting to die."

Unsettling but in a good way.

"You stumble into the cell, wishing you had not looked. That room is like
heaven, or hell, or the moment of death itself: a place you should not see
until your name is called."

"How cruel it felt, to create something then let it go, with only snapshot evidence of how it had grown."

"the love of a friend, good conversation late at night. The love of a party,
whiskey in the moonlight. The love of sex... And Lavender had finally
learned how to love the stretch of her own limbs, first thing in the morning...There was nothing like the love you had for your own child. It was biological. Primal and evolutionary. It was chronic, unbanishable. It had been living inside her all this time. Bone-deep."

"There was a language special for the trees. A whispered understanding.
The sound was clearest early in the morning, when the mist curled between rustling leaves and Lavender could still smell the night, lingering smoky in the redwoods’ bark."

"You realized it then. If you could be helped, they would have done it long ago. The singular truth of your life seemed to rise from your chest, unignorable, as you backed out through the ER’s sliding doors.
You were impossible. Beyond help. You would never be more than your
own creature self"

"You suspected you would not find that stunning relief again, but you had to try, just one more time. You did not care what it meant, that peace came only after violence, and then only sometimes. It felt less like a choice and more like a need—you had to chase the quiet."

"You have forgotten the sun, tickling the skin on your arms, and
you stop for a sweet breath before the warden yanks you forward.
The world is bristling, magic. And soon it will be yours again."

"Clouds. The cotton candy puff of them, lethargic and easy, half asleep."

"Saffy wondered about her own internal compass, the needle that kept her on this path, stopped her from wandering or regressing or giving up entirely. It scared her to realize there was no compass. There were only days and the choices she made within them"

"'He didn’t get the fellowship in the end. From what I remember,
he was—how do I put this? An average student who believed he deserved
more. One of his female classmates got the award instead, and I don’t think
he took it well. He dropped out shortly after.'"

"But what else was there? There was only going back. Tracing the lines,
there to here. Self to self."

"'Look,' Moretti said, with an unbearable sort of tenderness. 'I know
what it’s like, to want something to be true. That does not make it so, and
you can’t let that cloud your judgment or close your eyes to other leads.
Things are different for us here, okay? It’s important that we don’t let our
emotions get in the way of our reasoning. Sometimes—sometimes it’s our
job not to feel however we do.'”

"Felix culpa, her mother had written. The happy fault. The horrible thing that leads to the good."

" In the mirror, she still saw bits of her mother, except
her mother had been white, and for that reason, Saffy would always
resemble her father to everyone else."

"Memory, Saffy thought, was unreliable. Memory was a thing to be
savored or reviled, never to be trusted."