Helena

“Easy to imagine inevitability when if fact there might once have been any number of options. It was always going to turn out this way, spoken like a charm against pain, against memory.”
― Julia Armfield, Private Rites

“With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“I say something

it sounds like words

it's not what they want to hear”
― Henry Hoke, Open Throat

“Lonely, ain't it?
Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula