yami

“The pony's head rose above the open roof as her mane whipped in the wind. I knew she must be thinking of running free through tallgrass fields, wild daisies slapping her shins, no one to hold her down.
I slid my hand up her leg, feeling raised ridges of whip scars. The tips of her ears had been cut. There were smaller scars across her nose. A knife had been used there, perhaps only to remind her who she belonged to. She had lived by the orders and commands of men. Her entire existence on earth and she had never once been allowed to be free. She had been imprisoned and owned, as if all of her value was wrapped up in how large a load she could carry on her back.
She had lived her life to the point of being given away, her legs too weak to run, her eyes no longer able to see a world beyond the coal cave she was forced to spend her life in. And yet, now she could feel the wind in her mane. She was not too dead for this small kindness that delivered her from a past of hell to a moment she could believe she was free enough to gallop as she wished.
Is this love? she must have been asking herself. Am I finally loved?”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

“Oh, living is so uncomfortable. Everything presses in: the body demands, the spirit never ceases, living is like being weary but being unable to sleep–living is upsetting. You can’t walk around naked, either in body or in spirit.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“Every time people said I was pretty, I thought of everything ugly swarming beneath my clothes.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“The glow of a cigarette in the dark. All the stars, the planets, the galaxies, the infinite edges. It’s all in the small glowin’ tip of a cigarette in the hand of a man leanin’ back against a wall, watchin’ a girl walk by on her way home, knowin’ she’ll never get there.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty