Nataliya Deleva > Quotes

“All these years later it’s like the blanket is still imbibed with her sorrow. Like an umbilical cord, it still connects me to her, melds each of my days to the day of my entrance into the world and to my severance from her.
Its edges are frayed and with each new day of my life, I think I see a run further unraveling the fibers, taking me further away from that first and last cuddle. I fear that one day it’ll unravel too far, it’ll make my bond with her so threadbare, it’ll waste away and vanish altogether. And I will forget. I will forget my mother; I will forget that I was ever born. I will forget everything.”
― Nataliya Deleva, Niewidzialni

“The question changed, the letters distorted and regrouped. […] Why did you leave, Naya? […] You left me to smoke alone in the dark. To slap my palm into my forehead, scratch my nails against my numbed scalp and pull my hair”
― Nataliya Deleva, Niewidzialni

“But what I could never quite grasp was how a mother’s love, so boundless and unconditional, could exist simply because a child did.”
― Nataliya Deleva, Niewidzialni

“When people and things change, this change is imperceptible to the outside world. Only the distance of time puts everything into perspective, allowing us to ascertain the movement.

How had my life evolved since I was eighteen? Ten? Five?”
― Nataliya Deleva

“It was the law of the matryoshka—the Russian nesting doll—out of each, a girl is born; the girl grows up and produces a girl who one day becomes a mother by giving birth to yet another girl who eventually bears one, too. The infinite thread of life renewing the kinfolk. I wondered if the moms came here to save one of us or to find salvation for themselves.”
― Nataliya Deleva, Niewidzialni