¡Hola Papi! Quotes

“We can't change the events of our lives. They happen, and there they are. But the lines we draw to connect those events, the shapes we make and the conclusions we reach, those come from us. They are our design.”
― John Paul Brammer, ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

“Trauma is always trying to convince us that we are beings trapped in amber, defined by the static, unchangeable events of our lives. But that’s not the case. The worst things that have ever happened to us don’t define us. We are the ones who get to define what those things mean.”
― John Paul Brammer, ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

“But one thing I’ve learned, and I’ve learned it more solidly than maybe I’ve learned anything else, is that humans are incapable of looking at anything clearly. Even the facts of our own lives—we can only hold a few at any given time, and they shift, they slip through our fingers, they rearrange themselves into new shapes and conspire to tell a different story.”
― John Paul Brammer, ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

“I thought of myself more as "a person with unique difficulty accessing heterosexuality.”
― John Paul Brammer, ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

“Trauma lives in the body long after the events that birthed it go away. It builds a home for itself in our memories, where it asserts itself as reality: I was treated this way because there is something wrong with me, and if I am to protect myself, then I must carry a healthy, vigilant sense of paranoia with me at all times. Never again, it says. The”
― John Paul Brammer, ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

“Hot people often walk like nothing bad has ever happened to them.”
― John Paul Brammer, ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

“All those years of remembering, carrying, and suffering over this person, and he probably hadn't thought about me at all since I'd moved away. I was willing to bet all my tormentors were also suffering from this kind of amnesia-- they didn't think about, care about, or remember what they'd done to me. The axe forgets; the tree remembers.”
― John Paul Brammer, ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

“We can’t change the events of our lives. They happened, and there they are. But the lines we draw to connect those events, the shapes we make and the conclusions we reach, those come from us. They are our own design.”
― John Paul Brammer, ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

“What if it had been the act of loving— the moving through life while loving, the way of seeing myself while loving, the splendid shapes love makes of the world, the way it takes the mundane and twists it into something altogether worthier?”
― John Paul Brammer, Hola Papi: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

“Even if I gathered up the courage to wear something gayer, Boring, my body would still be wrong. The beautiful people who wore these extravagant looks were thin, lithe gazelles. Then there were the men who wore next to nothing, who could just show up in jockstraps and eye shadow. They were muscular and impossibly fit.”
― John Paul Brammer, ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

“What if, Wasted, I’m still not so different from that kid who was chasing after someone, anyone, who would validate his place in the world and make him feel less alone? What if I’m still navigating taboos and social expectations and making missteps along the way? I think I prefer that way of looking at it, because I find myself wanting to “keep” the time I spent with Rebecca. I don’t want to see our relationship as a failed experiment or a sad attempt at hiding who I really was. I want to include that time, the good and the bad, in the project of my life. I want to be happy when I think of the times Rebecca made me happy. Perhaps, Wasted, that’s my way of making peace.”
― John Paul Brammer, ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

“He’d lean in when asking these questions. “John, I hear so often of the guns in your country. What a problem, yes? It makes me nervous for you.”
― John Paul Brammer, ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

“I think that’s why it’s important that we express ourselves: you never know who might be listening and who needs to hear you.”
― John Paul Brammer, ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

“Everything has something to say about the world we live in—and I found that, in the way I was dressing, in the way I was presenting, I wasn’t speaking my mind. I was apologizing. I was tired of that. I wanted to feel powerful in the way that I defined power. I wanted to be like my mom clomping down the hall in heels. I wanted to be like the queers at HoMo, audacious but in my own way.”
― John Paul Brammer, ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

“All those years of remembering, carrying, and suffering over this person, and he probably hadn’t thought about me at all since I’d moved away. I was willing to bet all my tormentors were also suffering from this kind of amnesia—they didn’t think about, care about, or remember what they’d done to me. The axe forgets; the tree remembers.”
― John Paul Brammer, ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

“I think the idea of “the one” is the wrong way to write your story about love. “The one” is convenient. It lets us organize the mess of our past romantic endeavors into a binary of failure—there were the ones who revealed themselves as failures, that didn’t work out, but they were in the service of helping us find “the one,” the one whom we’ve been searching or waiting for. I’m not sure that person exists at all. I think there are simply important people in our lives. They don’t always stay important. They don’t always stick around. But the point at which we meet them, the point on the grid where our lives intersect, is a sacred thing. It makes them “the one” in that moment; just because that moment ends, it doesn’t mean it’s any less special. You can’t help but romanticize it, make stories out of it, think about it when it’s gone, as long as you don’t linger there.”
― John Paul Brammer, ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

“Sometimes, Addicted, you have to just let a person roll down to the mouth of your driveway, turn their blinker on, and go.”
― John Paul Brammer, ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

“I asked how you could be pro-life and pro-war at the same time,” he told me, as if he expected me to reward him with a treat. “Like, how you gonna be against abortion but then kill a shit ton of people, you know what I mean? It don’t make no sense, dude!”
― John Paul Brammer, ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

“Race is a system more concerned with creating experiential differences than it is about whether or not you’re “really” anything. Abuela and Javier taught me that. It’s more important that you care about the lives and the pain of the people around you than it is for you to know how to say “dick” in Spanish. It’s more important that you listen rather than speak.”
― John Paul Brammer, ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

“I thought of girls as allies, inasmuch as they weren’t as terrible as boys, and I thought of them as possessing some method of living that I was jealous of: going to the bathroom together, caring about what they smelled like, putting together outfits—all things I would eventually discover weren’t inherently feminine, really, but activities that sounded like great fun I was missing out on.”
― John Paul Brammer, ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

“And what if it wasn't Thomas I had been missing all this time? What if it had been the act of loving -- the moving through life while loving, the way of seeing myself while loving, the splendid shapes love makes of the world, the way it takes the mundane and twists it into something altogether worthier?”
― John Paul Brammer, ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

“Yeah,” she’d say, “you can’t drive there if you’re a woman.” “Yeah, they had that genocide.” The one place that excited her was Philadelphia. “Philly!” she’d say, eyes lit up. “God, you gotta go.”
― John Paul Brammer, ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons

“People seek advice for this reason: the overwhelming notion that there are incorrect and correct choices to be made. Bad things have to happen; you learn from them and come out on the other side without letting those experiences, or their ghosts, join you and cloud your judgment. But one thing I’ve learned, and I’ve learned it more solidly than maybe I’ve learned anything else, is that humans are incapable of looking at anything clearly. Even the facts of our own lives—we can only hold a few at any given time, and they shift, they slip through our fingers, they rearrange themselves into new shapes and conspire to tell a different story.”
― John Paul Brammer, ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons