He just didn’t want to see how damaged she was. As long as she didn’t show him, that was all he asked for. A good show.
It made me hopefully, like someday my life would make sense too, if I could just hold all the pieces together at the same time.
The smell of the smoke always brought me back to my mother, to a rooftop under an untrustworthy moon. How beautiful she had been, how perfectly unhinged.
It felt so good to be high. I felt the lid of the pencil-gray sky lift and I could breathe, I didn’t dread the rest of the afternoon now.
Once the worst had happened to you, all the rest was just stuff and absence.
Of course I did, I was blank, anyone could fill me in. I waited to see who I would be, what they would create on my delicious vacancy.
Four was difficult and misunderstood, a genius before its time, it belonged to the planet of unexpected disaster.
I liked the shifting colors of groups on the courtyard, but could not distinguish one student from the next. They were too young and undamaged, sure of themselves. To them, pain was a country they had heard of, maybe watched on a show about on TV, but one whose stamp had not yet been made in their passports. Where could I find a place where my world connected to theirs?
He had bars on all the windows now. She stroked his new security door with the pads of her fingers like it was fur. “Taste his fear. It tastes just like champagne. Cold and crisp and absolutely without sweetness.
I looked at my life and saw quite clearly that I was not surviving it in the turquoise house. I was letting my sails crust up with salt. I had to stop playing johnny johnny and concentrate on preparing for rain, preparing for rescue.
They’d retreated to the country with two passports only. From the outside it looked like death. People could pound the walls all they wanted, but they’d never find the door. Nobody could guess at the gardens inside.
That was Ingrid Magnussen. She made up rules and suddenly they were engraved on the Rosetta Stone, they’d been brought to the surface from a cave under the Dead Sea, they were inscribed on scrolls from the T’ang Dynasty.
The mind was so thin, barely a spiderweb, with all its fine thoughts, aspirations, and beliefs in its own importance. Watch how easily it unravels, evaporates under the first lick of pain. Gasping.
That was how you did it. You let go, you left all that behind, you refused to remember. You let the dark in.
Reverend Thomas said that in hell, the sinners were indifferent to the suffering of others, it was part of damnation. I hadn’t understood that until now.
It didn’t much matter where the path went, she wasn’t the least bit curious, she just needed a direction.
She was drifting outside the limit of all reason, where the next stop was light-years away through nothing but darkness.
It was one thing to hope, but you had to take care of yourself in the present, or you wouldn’t survive.
IT DIDN’T TAKE ME long to figure out why the girls called Amelia Cruella De Vil. In the beautiful wooden house, we went hungry all the time.
The future was a white fog into which I would vanish, unmarked by the flourish of rustling taffeta blue and gold. No mother to guide me. I.