⋆˚｡⋆୨୧˚Kaela Rose˚୨୧⋆｡˚⋆’s Reviews > On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous > Status Update

”If you were a god you would tell them to stop clapping. You would tell them that the most useful thing one can do with empty hands is hold on. But you are not a god.
You’re a woman. A mother, and your son is lying under the pines while you sit at a kitchen table across town, waiting again.”

“Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are.
To be or not to be. That is the question.”

“But my doubt is everywhere, Ma. Even when I know something to be true as bone I fear the knowledge will dissolve, will not, despite my writing it, stay real. I’m breaking us apart again so I might carry us somewhere else—where, exactly, I’m not sure.”

“There is so much I want to tell you, Ma. I was once foolish enough to believe, knowledge would clarify, but some things are so gauzed behind layers of syntax and semantics, behind days and hours, names forgotten, salvaged, and shed, that simply knowing the wound exists does nothing to relieve it.”

“When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?”

“If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with the silent propulsion to fly south, to turn towards the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast.”

“The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past.”

“Out my window this morning, just before sunrise, a deer stood in a fog so dense and bright that the second one, not too far away, looked like the unfinished shadow of the first.
You can color that in. You can call it ‘The History of Memory.’”

“Our hands empty except for our hands.”

“I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn’t trying to make a sentence—I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunted and its prey.”