Women always put men first. That’s how everything got so screwed up.
Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness. I was torn and stitched. I was a strip mine, and they would just have to look. I hoped I made them sick. I hoped they saw me in their dreams.
Girls were born knowing how destructive the truth could be. They learned to hold it in, tamp it down, like gunpowder in an old fashioned gun. Then it exploded in your face on a November day in the rain.
That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific-chair, eye, stone- but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn’t include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out.
How vast was a human being’s capacity for suffering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn’t a question of survival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much could you hold, how much could you care.
Just because a poet said something didn’t mean it was true, only that it sounded good.
Oleander time, she said. Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind.
How right that the body changed over time, becoming a gallery of scars, a canvas of experience, a testament to life and one’s capacity to endure it.
But I knew one more thing. That people w ho denied who they were or where they had been were in the greatest danger.
And I realized as I walked through the neighborhood how each house could contain a completely different reality. In a single block, there could be fifty separate worlds. Nobody ever really knew what was going on just next door.
Whenever she thought she could not feel more alone, the universe peeled back another layer of darkness.
They say drugs are not the answer, but really, what is the question?
Don’t turn over the rocks if you don’t want to see the pale creatures who live under them.
That was what she really wanted. To forget so thoroughly she’d never have another memory again, the bitter so bitter you gave up the sweet.
The story of her life. God gave you everything just to take it away. Just so you knew exactly what you were missing.
It’s all I ever really wanted, that revelation. The possibility of fixed stars.
I liked it when my mother tried to teach me things, when she paid attention. So often when I was with her, she was unreachable. Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.
She’s never where she is,′ I said. ‘She’s only inside her head.
It’s their skins I’m peeling,” she said. “The skins of the insipid scribblers, which I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness.
Rena noticed me watching it pass. ‘You think they don’t got problem?’ Rena said. ‘Everybody got problem. You got me, they got insurance, house payment, Preparation H.’ She smiled, baring the part between her two upper teeth. ‘We are the free birds. They want to be us.