Marissa Lopez

“Maybe then she would understand how love cannot possibly be simple, or easy, despite all the adages to the contrary. When we chose to chisel pieces of our heart away to offer to another person, we must always make decisions. What flaws will we life to the light? And which will we bury, in the hopes of protecting ourselves and others?”
― Thao Thai, Banyan Moon

“I wonder if you can inherit evil.'
'Maybe. Or maybe it's not something you inherit, but something that runs through you, another person's trauma, their violence. It sits below the skin until you name it. And you root it out like a cancer.”
― Thao Thai, Banyan Moon

“I wonder if there's an invisible string somewhere they can carry my message to Bà Ngoai, like a phone wire between the living, the dead, and the little fluttering being in between. Kumquat, our conduit. Maybe from the heavens, Bà Ngoai could lean down, blow all that misguided goodwill into the wind, where it would find its way to me, to my womb and to my baby boy. I almost feel her breath in the sunshine, and in it is the shudder of relief and love, both so wrapped up that I think there should be another word for the feeling entirely.”
― Thao Thai, Banyan Moon

“thought about how, for so much of my life, I’d survived by staying quiet, making myself small enough to fly under the radar. I decided then that I no longer wanted to be quiet. I wanted to be loud and colorful and every piece of myself at any one time. As I lay there, I began to dream of”
― Andrés N. Ordorica, How We Named the Stars