Sylvia Flora

“I am sitting next to a middle-aged Midwestern blonde from Shakopee, Minnesota. She is unremarkable; from the outside she looks less unkempt than some, a veneer of solidity that makes me wonder what she's doing here. Then she tells her story. Her thirty-year-old daughter, her best friend as she described her, had planned a big fiftieth birthday party for her. She had set up catering, had had a cake delivered to her mom's house. A few hours before the party, she had been with her mom setting up tables and making a playlist, and then left to go to her apartment to change clothes. She said to her mother what she said every time they parted, "I love loving you," and walked out the door. She never showed up for the party. She had gone home and hanged herself. This mother, that veneer I had misrecognized, was a husk, all that was left of a body destroyed by the unknown becoming known. "What had I missed?" she asked.

What was lurking inside the body of her daughter that day? What was underneath the party planning and the love of loving her mother? What could that young woman not bear to know, not bear to feel?”
― P. Carl, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition

“Okay, let's do it, let's do the drugs, let's do the chemical lobotomy, let's shut down the higher functions of my brain and perhaps I'll be a bit more fucking capable of living.”
― Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis

“Not everything that breaks is meant to be repaired. Some things must be remade, with different hands and different intent.”
― Lawrence Nault

“We are all dust and nobody will ever be remembered, we all die at the end but if I will be remembered, I want to be remembered for my ability to love and feel.”
― Hana Z., Grief as it is: a published journal of love and grief