Slowly the conversation sputtered. We started talking like people who used to be close, catching each other up on our lives rather than living them together. By the time he payed the bill, I knew that whatever we had been, we weren’t anymore.
An eye for an eye leaves the whole world monocular.
And then it became harder to summon him, to smell his smell, to feel him lifting me up. My father died suddenly, but also across the years. He was still dying, really – which meant I guess that he was still living, too.
When I was little, I knew monsters weren’t, like, real. But I also knew I could be hurt by things that weren’t real. I knew that made-up things mattered, and could kill you.
And as I sat beneath florescent cylinders spewing aggressively artificial light, I thought about how we all believed ourselves to be the hero of some personal epic, when in fact we were basically identical organisms colonizing a vast and windowless room that smelled of Lysol and lard.
I believe we have a choice in this world about how to tell sad stories, on the one hand, we can sugercoat it. Nothing is too messed up that can’t be fixed with a Peter Gabriel song, I like this version as much as the next girl does. It’s just not the truth.
Well, everyone’s crazy these days, Dr. Singh. Adolescent sanity is so twentieth century.
I know you’re not trying to make me feel pressure, but it feels like I’m hurting you, like I’m committing assault or something, and it makes me feel ten thousand times worse. I’m doing my best, but I can’t stay sane for you.
Let’s continue this awkward silence in person.
You feeling scared?” “Kinda.” “Of what?” “It’s not like that. The sentence doesn’t have, like, an object. I’m just scared.
Something about looking up always makes me feel like I’m falling.
I would lean forward and trace my hands down your arms and curve my neck into yours and let you turn into me and rest there for a while and when you were ready, i’d kiss you once and lift myself away, sit back on your bed and wait for you there, just so we could lie there, and you could hold me and i could hold you. And it would be so peaceful. Like the feeling of sleep, but being awake in it together.
A woman needs a strong man to take care of her like a fish needs a bicycle.
I don’t understand why he’s so stuck inside himself, when there is this endlessness to fall into.
I started thinking about turtles all the way down. I was thinking that maybe the old lady and the scientist were both right. Like, the world is billions of years old, and life is a product of nucleotide mutation and everything. But the world is also the stories we tell about it.
It’s not like you believe yourself to be normal. You know there is a problem. But you can’t figure a way through to fixing it.
Sometimes it seems the universe wants to be noticed.’ “That’s what I believe. I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it – or my observation of it – is temporary?
People were created to be loved. Things were created to be used. The reason the world is in chaos, is because things are being loved and people are being used.
I looked down and thought about how I was made of paper. I was the flimsy-foldable person, not everyone else.
We are literally in the heart of Jesus,” he said. “I thought we were in a church basement, but we are literally in the heart of Jesus.