Antonia

“When I was a kid, I used to have these panic attacks thinking about how I could never be anyone else. I couldn’t be my mom or my dad, and for my whole life, I’d have to walk around inside a body that kept me from ever truly knowing anyone else.”
― Emily Henry, People We Meet on Vacation

“I met a man tonight. A high school English teacher
from the next town. A small town. Maybe

I shouldn’t have, but he had the hands
of someone I used to know. Someone I was used to.

The way they formed brief churches
over the table as he searched for the right words.

I met a man, not you. In his room the Bibles shook on the shelf
from candlelight. His scrotum a bruised fruit. I kissed it

lightly, the way one might kiss a grenade
before hurling it into the night’s mouth.

Maybe the tongue is also a key.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“I wonder if I'll ever be able to have what I like or if my tastes are too various to be sustained by one of anything.”
― Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

“Before he could speak and harm her with words while she lay naked and exposed, while he prepared a judgment, she was preparing her metamorphosis, so that whatever Sabina he struck down she could abandon like a disguise, shedding the self he had seized upon and say: "That was not me."
Any devastating words addressed to the Sabina he had possessed, the primitive one, could not reach her then; she was already halfway out of the forest of their desire, the core already far away, invulnerable, protected by flight. What remained was a costume: it was piled on the floor of his room, and empty of her.”
― Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love