Erika Gallion

“I glimpsed a huge beyond when I became a mother, the enormity of an abyss or the opposite of an abyss, the idea of complete fullness, the anti-death, tiny gods everywhere. But now all the world wants to hear of me is how I juggle children and career, how I manage to get the kids to eat their veggies, how I lost the weight. I will never lose this weight. When one encounters a mother doing too many things perfectly, smiling as if it is all so easy, so natural, we should feel a civic responsibility to slap her hard across the face, to scream the word Stop! Stop! So many times the woman begins to chant or whimper the word along with us. Once she has been broken, take her in your arms until the trembling and self-hatred leave her body. It is our duty. I used to think it was motherhood that loosens a woman’s grasp on sanity. Now I see it is the surplus and affluence of America. Plus something else, something toxic, leaking poison, fear. Something we can’t yet see.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Dark Dark

“What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Kit feels a kink in his heart. His girl is in the shower, soaping her every inch of skin. He cannot see the maze of tubes and cavities inside her body. He cannot know what is pumping right and what is pumping wrong, how each of those slippery organs is tucked against its neighbor and whether something bad is truly blooming there. Whether, even if her body is perfect, a truck will lose its brakes, tumble off the road where Summer is walking. There are storms beginning to twist in the warm oceans to the south, and maybe they will whip this way, tearing the houses like paper. The ferry could sink beneath them; poisoned gases could leak into the air at any time. The melted ice caps are washing toward them. They’re both dying- everyone is. The schedule of death is not made public. Love’s job is to make a safe place. Not to deny that the spiny forest exists, but to live hidden inside it, tunneled into the soft undergrass”
― Ramona Ausubel, Awayland

“Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets