the death of vivek oji

• ➊ “I'm not what anyone thinks I am. I never was. I didn't have the mouth to put it into words, to say what was wrong, to change the things I felt I needed to change. And every day it was difficult, walking around and knowing that people saw me one way, knowing that they were wrong, so completely wrong, that the real me was invisible to them. It didn't even exist to them. So: If nobody sees you, are you still there?”
• ➋ “Somewhere, you see, in the river of time, I am already alive.”
• ➌ “Alone is a feeling you can get used to, and it's hard to believe in a better alternative.”
• ➍ “I felt heavy my whole life. Life was like being dragged through concrete in circles, wet and setting concrete that dried with each rotation of my unwilling body. As a child, I was light. It didn’t matter too much; I slid through it, and maybe it even felt like a game, like I was just playing in mud, like nothing about that slipperiness would ever change, not really. But then I got bigger and it started drying on me and eventually I turned into an uneven block, chipping and sparking on the hard ground, tearing off into painful chunks. I wanted to stay empty, like the eagle in the proverb. I couldn’t shake it off; I couldn’t transform it, evaporate or melt it. It was distinct from me, but it hooked itself into my body like a parasite. I couldn’t figure out if something was wrong with me or if this was just my life—if this was just how people felt, like concrete was dragging their flesh off their bones.”

acts of desperation

• ➊ “Mediating your own victimhood is just part of being a woman. Using it or denying it, hating it or loving it, and all of these at once. Being a victim is boring for everyone involved. It is boring for me to present myself through experiences which are instrumentalized constantly as narrative devices in soap operas and tabloids. Is this why I am so ashamed of talking about certain events, or of finding them interesting? This is part of the horror of being hurt generically. Your experiences are so common that they become impossible to speak about in an interesting way.”
• ➋ “And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.” — Raymond Carver, from Late Fragment

devotion

• ➊ “Back then, I thought my loneliness came from being too much in the house, in feeling an obligation to become someone I knew I was not. After all this time, I know that I was lonely not just because I wanted to be seen and understood but because I also wanted to offer understanding. To find a home for the love within me.”
• ➋ “I was never enough as I was. My best self, the self that might be most loved, most accepted, was forever in front of me - a shadow self ahead of me on the path that, no matter how fast I ran, never melded with my person.”
• ➌ “We are golden here. The light makes us so. If the grapes are sweet, it is because we sleep under the gnarled hands that offer them. If you kindle a fire, we will warm ourselves by it. We will warm ourselves at every fire you light. If you ever feel pain that comes from a deep knowing that it will not last, that it cannot last, it will pass, it is passing, know that some things remain. The song is endless. We will wait for you, and then we will go together.”

hex

• ➊ “Despite what he has done, I don’t wish him dead. I will not take the mark of his evil on my soul. I will not let him make me the way he is: that kind of malevolence belongs to him, and I return it to him threefold. I cannot choose to live, but I can decide to leave this world with men’s hatred as the strongest mark on me. I am walking out of this cell and I will hold my head up and take with me the one thing people like him envy and seek to destroy or tarnish or dull or steal. Light. My goodness, my heart, my ability to heal.”
• ➋ “Some people might think it is not possible to so desperately miss someone you do not yet know, or a home you have never had, but I do. I have done so my whole life. I miss people I have never met. Mourn them. Even sometimes more than those who have already, one by one, been taken from me.”

you let me in

• ➊ “Faeries are no fit company for the living; touching them taints you like a disease. I grew like a pale fruit in the shadows, small and bitter, never getting enough sun - but I grew. I didn’t shrivel up and die; didn’t fall from the branch” and crash to the ground. I was a white apple, a moon-colored pear, a toxic green plum the size of a coin. Grew strange and crooked, but there was life, flushing my veins with rich red blood, enough to sustain more than one.”
• ➋ “I could easily hold two strings of truth in my mind and feel them both to be real without getting all confused about it. Pepper-Man or no Pepper-Man - that’s just two sides of the same coin. It all depends on which side you look at. I could see them both.”