Jessica

“I could never have been anything if I remained with him. Don't you see? Who wants to be a helper, merely? But I don't say this. It sounds cold when in fact the opposite is true. He eclipsed everything. I handed myself over to him and he lived in me. I found it almost impossible to do anything in his presence. It occurs to me, only now, what he gave me by not saying he loved me. My solitude. He wanted what was at the heart of me to remain my own. Being with him required all my thinking and loving and force, all the time. Everything I had. It was not pure awe, because somehow it oddly gave me strength. To see into the centre of him and then into the centre of me.”
― Heidi Sopinka, The Dictionary of Animal Languages

“So much of making something out of life comes from the physical world, from really looking at everything. The smell after rain, trees illuminated in a storm, the sound of a screen door, the first star, all the things that compose your existence moment to moment. It forces you to live in the present, which is the only thing I've ever known to stop the sinking fear of death.”
― Heidi Sopinka, The Dictionary of Animal Languages

“Routine lures you, it makes you feel your own identity. Though I often think the opposite. That in repetition, you can lose sight of yourself.”
― Heidi Sopinka, The Dictionary of Animal Languages

“I've never understood why everyone know know that women are the ones who convey things in the most interesting ways, I say. We have always observed. We have been used to no audience and that has given us room to really see.”
― Heidi Sopinka, The Dictionary of Animal Languages