aishah

“Sometimes I wonder if I have really been the same person my whole life. I stare at the picture, and think: Is that really me? I have this bizarre feeling like I was a different person at every other stage of my life. I feel so removed from myself then. Sometimes I feel like I was a different person a month ago. A day. Five minutes. Now.”
― Emily R. Austin, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

“And it was that, the beyond-grief, the sealing-up of a mind still expected to produce order and plans, which she dreaded.”
― Jacquelyn Mitchard, The Deep End of the Ocean

“When something was strange, everyone thought they had the right to come stomping in all over your life to figure out why.”
― Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman

“When a daughter loses a mother, the intervals between grief responses lengthen over time, but her longing never disappears. It always hovers at the edge of her awareness, ready to surface at any time, in any place, in the least expected ways. This isn’t pathological. It’s normal. It’s why you find yourself, at twenty-four, or thirty-five or forty-three, unwrapping a present or walking down an aisle or crossing a busy street, doubled over and missing your mother because she died when you were seventeen.”
― Hope Edelman, Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss