Edward

“Clack. "I cannot bear the thought of using you."

Pause. "Love and freedom don't coexist,

Warden."

Clack. "This is all there is to love? Simply by being in your life, I have added indelibly to its weight?"

Pause. "Yes."

Clack. "Camilla, I mean it."

Pause. "I meant it too. You used to say it to me."

"We are one flesh." Clack.

"I am your end."

Pause. "That didn't mean I got squatting rights in your soul. I never would have asked for that. I never had rights to that."

Clack. "Sure. That's why I gave them to you."

Clack. Pause. Pause. Pause.

"I hope you know that I adore you, Scholar."

Clack. "Indubitably, Warden.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth

“I’ve just never met someone like you," as if I were a stranger from another town or an eccentric guest accompanying a mutual friend to a dinner party. It was a strange thought to hear from the mouth of the woman who had birthed and raised me, with whom I shared a home for eighteen years, someone who was half me. My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her. Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line—generational, cultural, linguistic—we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other’s expectations, until these past few years when we had just begun to unlock the mystery, carve the psychic space to accommodate each other, appreciate the differences between us, linger in our refracted commonalities. Then, what would have been the most fruitful years of understanding were cut violently short, and I was left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without its key.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“I have built a you within me, or you have. I wonder what of me there is in you.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“But when I think of you, I want to be alone together. I want to strive against and for. I want to live in contact. I want to be a context for you, and you for me.

I love you, and I love you, and I want to find out what that means together.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War