Shelly

“I’m an open book,” I say, thinking of all the men who have found it illegible. I made mistakes with these men. I dove for their legs as they tried to leave my house. I chased them down the hall with a bottle of Listerine, saying, I can be a beach read, I can get rid of all these clauses, please, I’ll just revise.”
― Raven Leilani , Luster

“Or maybe I’m not a monster at all; maybe I’m just the result of a life of work, another human being maintaining the status quo out of pure laziness, and now I appropriate other people’s ideas the way older people used to appropriate mine. Maybe I’m just another stagnant adult who’s lost the energy to change things. Something that, come to think of it, might make me the worst sort of monster.”
― Beatriz Serrano, El descontento

“I don’t know where they get all that rage, that competitiveness, that way of seeing and dividing the world into winners and losers. I find it strange how some men use war and sports terminology when they’ve never been in a war and haven’t kicked a ball since high school. Preparing for battle, winning the war, destroying the enemy. How can they see themselves as soldiers and warriors when they’re inside apartments filled with gray IKEA furniture with greasy paper bags from Just Eat piling up in their dirty kitchens? How are they capable of dissociating between the little men they are and the great men they were promised they would become? I think about whether they’re loved by someone, who that could be, and in what way. Who would be the woman—because they’re always women—to make herself smaller so that a man can continue seeing himself as big? Big like Alexander the Great, like Julius Caesar, like Christopher Columbus. Big like all those glorious epics they’ve been imbibing since their earliest infancy. I think about how those men are capable of fooling themselves, but, most of all, how they manage to get the world to sustain that deception. I think about whether at night, right before going to sleep, they feel like impostors or if they’ve swallowed their own lie and sleep like babies. No one talks back to them, no one contradicts them, no one tells them to shut up. No one says that “step up or step aside” is a total crock of shit. And so, it’s almost normal that those men think of themselves as warriors, because by molding the world to their delusions of grandeur, they’ve already won their own battle.”
― Beatriz Serrano, El descontento

“Now that I had a salary, I decided to stay a little longer. But because everyone was still traumatized after the 2008 crisis, I kept hearing how lucky I was to have a job, and I suppose we were all afraid to quit and pursue our dreams and, in my case, the advertising world seemed safer and more reliable than the hypothetical and increasingly distant world of art. I guess I made the wrong decision. Or maybe, between the possibility of being happier and buying more things, I chose to buy more things.”
― Beatriz Serrano, El descontento