Later that night, I held an atlas on my lap, ran my fingers across the whole world, and whispered, ‘where does it hurt?’ It answered, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.
It’s not my responsibility to be beautiful. I’m not alive for that purpose. My existence is not about how desirable you find me.
I know a few things to be true. I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing, I am unwelcome and my beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing.
Perhaps, the problem is not the intensity of your love, but the quality of the people you are loving.
There is no intimacy like that between two women who have chosen to be sisters.
I want to love, but my hair smells of war and running and running.
When I love, I love: wholly, thoroughly, completely, drowning in everything. Every glance can be a conversation, eyes just playing and saying what needs to be said. Silence is loud, and the air becomes heavy. I want you. I want all of you.
I belong deeply to myself.
Two people who were once very close can without blame or grand betrayal become strangers. Perhaps this is the saddest thing in the world.
How far have you walked for men who’ve never held your feet in their laps?
I won’t glorify or romanticise heartbreak, for me it was a kind of death and I was forced to keep living.
I have my mother’s mouth and my father’s eyes; on my face they are still together.
Make love like you have no secrets like you’ve never been left never been hurt like the world don’t owe you a single wretched thing.
My heart is a flower blossoming out of my mouth.
At the end of the day, it isn’t where I came from. Maybe home is somewhere I’m going and never have been before.
The ego hurts you like this: you become obsessed with the one person who does not love you. blind to the rest who do.
You can’t make homes out of human beings.
To my daughter I will say, ‘when the men come, set yourself on fire.’
Your mouth is a lonely place but I keep coming back.
Apathy is the same as war, it all kills you, she says. Slow like cancer in the breast or fast like a machete in the neck.
I tore up and ate my own passport in an airport hotel once. I’m bloated with language I can’t afford to forget.