Bridget Hendzel

“There is an artist my mother loved, Juan Gabriel, who was once asked in an interview if he was gay. His reply: What's understood need not be said. I remember how Mami's eyes fluttered to me like a bee on a flower acknowledging the pollen is sweet.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Clap When You Land

“If someone changes so much that they're barely the same person, who are you even missing?”
― Allison Larkin, The People We Keep

“I’ve just never met someone like you," as if I were a stranger from another town or an eccentric guest accompanying a mutual friend to a dinner party. It was a strange thought to hear from the mouth of the woman who had birthed and raised me, with whom I shared a home for eighteen years, someone who was half me. My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her. Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line—generational, cultural, linguistic—we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other’s expectations, until these past few years when we had just begun to unlock the mystery, carve the psychic space to accommodate each other, appreciate the differences between us, linger in our refracted commonalities. Then, what would have been the most fruitful years of understanding were cut violently short, and I was left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without its key.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“God is the fire, the nudge, the warm liquid gold swelling and pressing inside me.”
― Glennon Doyle, Untamed