Everytime he brushes me with his fingers, time seems to tether for a second, like it is in danger of dissolving. The whole world is dissolving, I decide, except for us. Us.
She was mine before she was yours.
There’s still always the possibility that I’ve gone totally, clinically cuckoo. But somehow I don’t think so anymore. An article I once read said that crazy people don’t worry about being crazy – that’s the whole problem.
Every choice is limited. That’s life.
He looked at me like I was beautiful.
I need to live my life in the light of their deaths. I need to live.
You can try to pin me down with a hundred thousand arms, but I will find a way to resist.
I’m used to a feeling of doubleness, of thinking one thing and having to do another, a constant tug-of-war.
Is it possible to tell the truth in a society of lies? Or must you always, of necessity, become a liar?
They told us love was a disease. They told us it would kill us in the end. For the very first time I realize, that this, too, might also be a lie.
There were days I asked for it-prayed for it when I went to sleep. The belief that I would see you again, that I could find you-the hope for it-was the only thing that kept me going.
With the cure, relationships are all the same, and rules and expectations are defined. Without the cure, relationships must be reinvented every day, languages constantly decoded and deciphered. Freedom is exhausting.
This is what amazes me: that people are new every day. That they are never the same. You must always invent them, and they must always invent themselves, too.
But maybe happiness isn’t in the choosing. Maybe it’s in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.
And you can’t love, not fully, unless you are loved in return.
Lindsay calls them the Pugs: pretty from far away, ugly up close.
We wanted the freedom to love. We wanted the freedom to choose. Now we have to fight for it.
At the same time I know that it’s not really their fault, at least not completely. I did my part too. I did it on a hundred different days and in a thousand different ways, and I know it. But this makes the anger worse, not better.
The rules of Panic are simple. Anyone can enter. But only one person will win.
And in that moment, the wordless thing passed between us, the thing that wasn’t quite love but was so close I could believe in it sometimes.