Being with you is as good as being alone.
People were... exhausting. They made her anxious. Leaving her apartment every morning was the turning over of a giant hourglass, the mental energy she’d stored up overnight eroding grain by grain. She refueled during the day by grabbing moments of solitude and sometimes felt her life was a long-distance swim between islands of silence.
It also meant she thought of books as medication and sanctuary and the source of all good things. Nothing yet had proven her wrong.
Do you know the best feeling in the world?” “Uh... ” Nina shook her head, despite having some ideas. Liz glowed. “It’s reading a book, loving every second of it, then turning to the front and discovering that the writer wrote fourteen zillion others.
It contained Nina’s favorite saying: You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.
She enjoyed people – she really did – she just needed to take them in homeopathic doses; a little of the poison was the cure.
If you’re not scared, you’re not brave.
Nina had looked around and realized she would never run out of things to read, and that certainty filled her with peace and satisfaction. It didn’t matter what hit the fan; as long as there were unread books in the world, she would be fine.
Being surrounded by books was the closest she’d ever gotten to feeling like the member of a gang. The books had her back, and the nonfiction, at least, was ready to fight if necessary.
Oh my God, she thought, it’s hard to be human sometimes, with the pressure to be civilized lying only very thinly over the brain of a nervous little mammal.
Tomorrow would be better. At the very least, tomorrow would be different.
Nina was enjoying the book; the writing was beautiful, the characters were real, the situations were bittersweet, but it was after an hour or so of reading that she came across a line that struck her so forcefully she had to close the book for a moment: “I’m lonely, ” the young character Ulysses said, “and I don’t know what I’m lonely for.
Biology is not destiny. And love is not proportionate to shared DNA.
Then don’t borrow trouble from tomorrow, baby. Don’t worry about how it might go wrong; just let yourself be happy.