Jade Song > Quotes

“A classic trait of girlhood - forever confusing your desires with that of an older man's.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“I guess hearts are slippery because they’re covered in blood. I wish I could bleed mine dry. Then I’d miss you less.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“Nearly every human memory is corrupted by the fact that it is a memory of being human”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“Humans and monsters both understand stories about magic and marvel and myth are made interesting by their stemming from trauma and violence and blood. How can one grow without pain?”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“My period continued, an inevitable cycle, yet every month I was somehow surprised by the violent pain. It was as if I refused to believe my body, something I’d trusted for years, would repeatedly betray me. My stomach ate itself from the inside, a revelry I had been dragged to, a feast I was forced to join though I was not hungry. The meal lasted four to six days, gorging on cramps, the spilled crumbs falling out of me stained with raspberry jam. My stomach was never a clean eater, gnawing on my uterus and fallopian tubes, leaving bite marks. I counted each rotation of the sun with heightening anxiety until it passed and I reset the clock. The knife carved my insides into pot roasts; the fork jabbed my sides into holey cheese. I could distinguish each fork prong—the pain was profound. My guts twisted around the spoon like spaghetti, tangled noodles slathered in scarlet marinara. Menstruation was more smashed acidic tomatoes than sweet fruit compote. I wiped my fingers on white jeans made of napkins and left streaks dried to rust. The stains came out with bleach and detergent. I died and regenerated every month. How else could I define the experience? The reasonable explanation was death. I decided when my body was wheeled into the morgue, the coroner would declare I died of being a woman. Which was far better than dying of being a man.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“On the day of my first period, I was more dead doe than human woman. Was womanhood always so violent, raw?”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“Humans are the downfall to myths. Whether the human razed the home, broke the heart, or betrayed the trust, the mythical is always in a worse state after the introduction.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“I never said yes, but I never said no, and the indefinite limbo of maybe is where regret and doubt and confusion reside as neighbors, forever reduced to the monotony of a clouded memory, the mind traveling in never-ending cul-de-sac circles.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“Do you understand the world I lived in? How my mutilations were a gift?”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“Mermaids were beautiful, and was I not also beautiful? Alluring? A creature of the water? Not of salt like the mermaids in the book, but of chlorine.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“Beautiful things demand touch. Hence the taped floors at art museums and the roped boundaries between paparazzi and celebrities on red carpets.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“They were both heavier than I remembered, as if their sadness had materialized into solid weights onto their shoulders, but it is true that what humans call intergenerational trauma has always been heavy, sinking to the gloomy abyss of repressed memory to be mined for so-called wisdom later. I was newly aware my parents were people who carried their burdens on their bodies rather than within themselves—this was my doomed inheritance.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“Grudges are for humans too small for forgiveness.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“And like blue eyes and whiteness, eventually I learned the Blue Eyes White Dragon was simply a construct too. A piece of flimsy card stock, its value ascribed by a mysterious higher power. I could go online and buy a million Blue Eyes White Dragon cards, and similarly, I could walk down the street of our suburb and see blue-eyed white girls everywhere, available a dime a dozen.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“I judged her days as remarkable for their mediocrity.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“He was a winner who did not understand how to lose, the most dangerous kind.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“As a mermaid, I now recognize how winning places the self within a construct of hierarchy over other bodies—a false construct. There’s no victory when someone else loses.

But back then, oh, how I adored winning. The rush of it all! You poor humans. You’ll never learn to be better, not when winning is so addictive.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“How was I supposed to differentiate between the pain due to the concussion and the pain due to the agony of everyday human life?”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“What is it called when immigrants reverse, when they wake up from the nightmare masked as a dream?”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“My heart screamed in capital letters.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“These moments after practice, in the dark, alone, were sacred and divine. Though I believed in neither God nor organized religion nor Jesus, I imagined I was in church, experiencing my own sort of baptism. I'd pray to the Pool Gods and Poseidon as I reclined on the lane rope, my body half-submerged, inhaling the embrace of chlorine like it was the last drop of water left in the oasis before I died parched in the desert. I'd float alone in the dark, silent pool for hours until the school janitor entered and yelled at me to go home.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“Please understand what I did was out of aching loneliness—the only reason people ever do anything.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“I didn't want to read his note. Every pen stroke of his, whether it was crossing the t's or dotting the i's, slashed my heart with both ferocious anger and wretched, unwanted affection for the diabolical man who had controlled so much of my human fate.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“My mouth swished around fallacies like soda, the rottenness decaying my teeth.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“Would a mermaid who stays at home, much-loved, with two beautiful parents and loving sisters who share everything, be worth memorializing?

No.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“Humans and monsters both understand stories about magic and marvel and myth are made interesting by their stemming from trauma and violence and blood.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“I planned to land like a cross onto your bed where your body indent rested—back then, hell, even now, I would have been willing to die by crucifixion if you controlled the nail and hammer.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“I transformed because I became who I was meant to be all along.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“I died and regenerated every month. How else could I define the experience? The reasonable explanation was death. I decided when my body was wheeled into the morgue, the coroner would declare I died of being a woman. Which was far better than dying of being a man.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“Nearly every human memory is corrupted by the fact that it is a memory of being human.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine