Nourhan

“It’s not at all what I thought it would be. Nothing is. No matter how much I love it, it doesn’t love me back. If I weren’t so broken, it would fit. I feel like I don’t have a home.”
― Mary H.K. Choi, Yolk

“I’m stuck here in a cycle and I am getting older but I am not growing up and my heart is getting soft dark spots on it like a fruit that has gone bad or is soft because too many hands have squeezed it but then put it back down not because I am not ready but because they were not ready for my type of fruity flesh. I felt so ripe and sweet—what was off? The truth is, I was forcing myself into people’s mouths. I jumped out of their hands and into their mouths and I yelled EAT ME way before they even had a chance to get hungry and notice me and lift me up.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“You’re asking me what I want for breakfast and I’m telling you
about how when the worst thing happened, I didn’t even cry.
You’re handing me a receipt from the laundromat down the street
and I’m passing you a bundle of letters that I wrote to God when
I was fourteen and scared. You’re passing me the milk after you drip it into your
coffee and I’m half laughing about the psychiatrist’s office and how there’s
actually a couch and it’s made of blue tweed. You’re trying to do the normal things
and I am throwing up dull pieces of truth onto our kitchen table. I can’t lie anymore.
These are the things I’ve done and they’re mostly sad. These are the places I’ve been
and they’re mostly awful. This life has woven itself into the notches of my spine
and I hear it creak every time I stand.”
― Fortesa Latifi

“In my dream I apologize to everyone I meet. Instead of introducing myself, I apologize for not knowing why I am alive. I am sorry. I am sorry. I apologize. In real life, oddly enough, when I am fully awake and out and about, if I catch someone’s eye, I quickly look away. Perhaps this too is a form of apology. Perhaps this is the form apologies take in real life. In real life the looking away is the apology, despite the fact that when I look away I almost always feel guilty; I do not feel as if I have apologized. Instead I feel as if I have created a reason to apologize, I feel the guilt of having ignored that thing—the encounter. I could have nodded, I could have smiled without showing my teeth. In some small way I could have wordlessly said, I see you seeing me and I apologize for not knowing why I am alive. I am sorry. I am sorry. I apologize. Afterwards, after I have looked away, I never feel as if I can say, Look, look at me again so that I can see you, so that I can acknowledge that I have seen you, so that I can see you and apologize.”
― Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric