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“When the call ends, Sommy wonders how she can be surrounded by abundance like its ocean water, and yet, like ocean water, every time she sinks her hand in and tries to grab some, it goes through her fingers.

“She thinks that the world is quite reckless in its unfair-ness, and she hates that she'll meet all her new outlandish privileges with this guilt, this sadness, and there's the feeling that it isn't worth it, to have all of this and to feel still like she's walking around with cold rocks in her stomach.”

Over twelve years. It's the same amount of time Chisom has been in love with Mezie. She formed her person around his person. It's what sixteen-year-olds do. To untangle herself would perhaps require a loss of an identity…But she fears that her "loss of identity" angle might strike a close emotional chord, for it is the same sort of crisis in which Bryan is enmeshed.

Elin says, “I guess the grass is greener on the other side.” Same thing she’d said to Bryan during their first conversation.

“Bryan stands and goes on to shake her hand. He is smiling, his usual impressive self. Sommy’s always proud whenever she introduces him to people. She can see how people see him: polished, oozing the scent of a good life. She can see how their perception of him elevates her in their eyes.”

“He is not your father,” Sommy says. It is her duty to say this, to undo his delusions. It is her duty because she loves him, and when you love someone, you disassemble their untruths.”

“It's absurd, she thinks, that not too long ago shed coaxed Mezie to go to see a thera-pist, as though it were a magical solution.”

This book is so crass IDK if I can even keep listening:..

“It’s good to have you back."
Her body slackens with glee. It's his first real acknowledgment of her. And she thinks now how ironic it is that as much as she wants to tear down this wall of his, she also admires it somewhat, this quality of a guarded private life.
"It’s good to be back home," she says.

“He can't confront him or be mad at him. That's the absolute worst thing. The anger goes inward or is directed at someone else, who most likely doesn't deserve it?

His articulacy is odd as is his ability to identify these tendencies in ochers and not in himself.

"(Bryan) will be fine…He didn't find what he went looking for. But now he at least knows to stop looking."

“Her mother is silent for a bit, and then she says, "If you people are thinking of having kids, this is something you must consider. I know that illnesses like these—dementia—can passed down to kids.

Imagine living with someone for that long and not knowing something this serious about them."

🪄⚡️

“It's absurd, she thinks, that not too long ago shed coaxed Mezie to go to see a therapist, as though it were a magical solution.”

✨Vocab! ✨

“She cannot seem to forgive Elin for being the only one left unscathed, for having intact whatever false, coruscating life she's dreamt up with Mezie. She knows Elin's own shattering will come, that eventually…”

I love this so much!

“She buries herself in her thesis on black women's travel narratives, reading sad books about women on journeys, women learning new places (Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood, Nella Larsen's Quicksand, Octavia Butler's Kindred). It feels like a kind of worship… an exploration of travel as survival, of what it means to leave home not for the mere adventure of it.”

“When Mezie had made his attempt, hadn't it been, for him, a matter of self-preservation, a matter of self-love? What were suicidal thoughts after all (I am tired, I can't fight anymore, I need to rest) if not self-preservation? He'd told her, days after his attempt, that he was staying for them, for her, their mother and father. That was love, his staying. Real love. Sacrificial love.“

“She ponders this rigorously, what it means to carry one's home inside them. Does this mean self-love? Walcott had written a poem on the subject after all: "Love after Love." "Feast on your life," he writes.“

❤️

“She had gone home, and home did not feel like home. The concept of home had become warped. Is it a place? A memory? An idea? The therapists on social media say "Home is wherever love is." In Omeros, Derek Walcott, says… "I do not live in you, I bear my house inside me, everywhere."
If home is wherever love is, and Bryan, whom she loves with all of her, has shut his doors, does that make her homeless?”

These sex scenes are a bit much… idk if i’ll be able to finish this.

WTH am I listening to?!

This is disgusting… rotten, indeed.

Judith smiles coolly, and then says, "Death is everywhere, and it is a must. Everyone will die. The earlier you accept that, the better." She wants to pierce through Judith's steeliness, draw out something unreasonable, wild with grief, but she's aware that she's burdening the already burdened, so she says instead, "It will be well."
"It will," Judith says.

Sommy cannot understand this concept of loss. Death is not simply final, she thinks. It is the meridian of finality, the most irretrievable of all losses. How does one accept it with such grace?
"It’s my greatest fear…Not for myself. I don't mind dying a quick death. Then I won't know, you know? I'll be dead. I won't feel anything. But I can't bear to be alive without the people I love."

“But I will not cry for the whole day like I do now. I will cry small. I will clean my eyes and I will continue…The living must continue to live." - Judith

“She’d thought that because she couldn't bring herself to commit an act, then it was simply an unhuman thing to do. But she's learnt that isn't true. There's evil in the world, evil that makes no sense, evil alien to her. She wonders now if someone else would think this of what they've done…is unhuman. Not a mere evil act but an alien evil one, impossible to comprehend.”

Money talks! It makes the crimes of the privilege disappear! Still, she lost her brother.

“When she'd thought Mezie dead, it was this gap she could not deal with, the thought that there would always be a space in the world carved by him and for him, and he would no longer be here to occupy it, and try as anyone might to fit into this space, they simply never would because it was his specific space.”

"What would you rather I'd done? Give up my spot in the program?"
"What I would rather you do now is stop acting like the kind of person who would do that. Stop acting like we have that type of relationship."
"I just buried a crime for you."
"You buried it so that your boyfriend will remain spotless."

“you hate me because I left and you are stuck here. Say it."
"I hate you because you are a fucking hypocrite," he says, something monstrous breaking through his otherwise soft features. "You say,
'Mezie, I'm here for you,' and in the same damn minute you are packing your bag, getting on an airplane.”

"You think we are still thirteen and sixteen. We are adults now, Somkele, and whatever we have is transactional. That means, I give you what you give me."
Sommy chuckles. "Strong man, strong man, but you can't be straight-forward. Open your mouth and say what you really want to say. Say you hate me because I left and you are stuck here. Say it."
"I hate you because you are a fucking hypocrite,"

“"You think I'm Chisom or Elin?" she says to Mezie. "You think you'll just shout with your bass voice and I'll start to run around scared? Or you think this is two years ago, when I still thought you had a heart?
Let me tell you—I have gotten to the point where I can tell you this: go and die. Mezie, go and die. I don't bloody care."

“The thing you said about primordial love,” Amara says. “It entered my heart because that’s how I feel about you, as if we are destiny friends. Friends from before.”