Nourhan

“This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I'd disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was the dream.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“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

“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

“and when nobody wakes you up in the morning, and when nobody waits for you at night, and when you can do whatever you want. what do you call it, freedom or loneliness?”
― Milan Kundera