- “but i was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell.”
- "davis and i never talked much, or even looked at each other, but it didn’t matter, because we were looking at the same sky together, which is maybe more intimate than eye contact anyway. anybody can look at you. it’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see."
- “worrying is the correct worldview. life is worrisome.”
- "last night i lay on the frozen ground, staring up at a clear sky only somewhat ruined by light pollution and the fog produced by my own breath — no telescope or anything, just me and the wide-open sky — and i kept thinking about how sky is a singular noun, as if it’s one thing. but the sky isn’t one thing. the sky is everything. and last night, it was enough."
- "and even though i laughed with them, it felt like i was watching the whole thing from somewhere else, like i was watching a movie about my life instead of living it."
- "i thought about him asking me if i’d ever been in love. it’s a weird phrase in english, in love, like it’s a sea you drown in or a town you live in. you don’t get to be in anything else—in friendship or in anger or in hope. all you can be in is love. and i wanted to tell him that even though i’d never been in love, i knew what it was like to be in a feeling, to be not just surrounded by it but also permeated by it, the way my grandmother talked about god being everywhere. when my thoughts spiraled, i was in the spiral, and of it. and i wanted to tell him that the idea of being in a feeling gave language to something i couldn’t describe before, created a form for it, but i couldn’t figure out how to say any of that out loud."
- “i like short poems with weird rhyme schemes, because that’s what life is like.” “that’s what life is like?” i was trying to get his meaning. “yeah. it rhymes, but not in the way you expect.”
- "she noted, more than once, that the meteor shower was happening, beyond the overcast sky, even if we could not see it. who cares if she can kiss? she can see through the clouds."
- “when you're on a ferris wheel all anyone ever talks about is being on the ferris wheel and the view from the ferris wheel and whether the ferris wheel is scary and how many more times it will go around. dating is like that. nobody who's doing it ever talks about anything else. i have no interest in dating.”
- "and for a while, we found ways to be us—hanging out irl occasionally, but texting and facetiming almost very night. we’d found a way to be on a ferris wheel without talking about being on a ferris wheel."
- "i pulled away from tau ceti’s twelve-year-old light and looked up at davis. i took his hand, and part of me wanted to tell him i loved him, but i wasn’t sure if i really did. our hearts were broken in the same places. that’s something like love, but maybe not quite the thing itself."
- "there’s no self to hate. it’s like, when i look into myself, there’s no actual me—just a bunch of thoughts and behaviors and circumstances. and a lot of them just don’t feel like they’re mine. they’re not things i want to think or do or whatever. and when i look for the, like, real me, i never find it."
- "she clicked off her light, and the world went dark. i felt my eyes trying to adjust, but there was no light to adjust to. “now you can’t see the walls, right? can’t see the rats. spin around a few times and you won’t know which way is in and which way is out. this is scary. now imagine if we couldn’t talk, if we couldn’t hear each other’s breathing. imagine if we had no sense of touch, so even if we were standing next to each other, we’d never know it. imagine you’re trying to find someone, or even you’re trying to find yourself, but you have no senses, no way to know where the walls are, which way is forward or backward, what is water and what is air. you’re senseless and shapeless—you feel like you can only describe what you are by identifying what you’re not, and you’re floating around in a body with no control. you don’t get to decide who you like or where you live or when you eat or what you fear. you’re just stuck in there, totally alone, in this darkness. that’s scary. this,” i said, and turned on the flashlight. “this is control. this is power. there may be rats and spiders and whatever the hell. but we shine the light on them, not the other way around. we know where the walls are, which way is in and which way is out. this,” i said, turning off my light again, “is what i feel like when i’m scared. this”—i turned the flashlight back on—“is a walk in the fucking park.”
- "people always talk like there’s a bright line between imagination and memory, but there isn’t, at least not for me. i remember what I’ve imagined and imagine what i remember."
- "you remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person, and why."
- "you stare up at the same sky together, and after a while he says, i have to go, and you say, good-bye, and he says, good-bye, Aza, and no one ever says good-bye unless they want to see you again."
jan 6 2020 ∞
jan 25 2021 +