Renee Godding

“Grief is a running tap, a closed cabinet, chopsticks touching bowls, teeth chewing. I’d never imagined that would be the case. I hadn’t expected it to slip into everything.”
― An Yu, Sunbirth

“Romantic love was a clear-cut institution, bolstered by orthodoxy and ritual. When a man lost his wife, it was expected that his world would unravel. But friendship… friendship was a wilderness with no guide. There were no courting rituals one might follow to pursue it, and little sympathy for the gut-wrenching horror of its loss.”
― Sheldon Costa, The Great Work

“And I could’ve drowned in that senseless joy of standing and finding myself tall. Someone that can finally be seen in a mirror. A twin to my dad. But when I glanced back at the pile of flesh with the stretchmarks, I thought; that’s me too. Can I be everything and nothing at the same time? Extra fat, extra parts, narrow bones. A shadow you know is there but whose shape remains unseen until it emerges on concrete. I want a body that’s easy to manipulate.
What a gift that no one sees inside my mind. What a curse that no one sees inside my mind.”
― Trang Thanh Tran, They Bloom at Night

“They are not here, her children. Not anymore. She finds them elsewhere sometimes. In the first smiles of her baby son, and the way his hair curls after a bath. They are in the high teenage voices of other children; girls the age her daughter would be now, with their gossamer clothing and their eyes lined in black uncertain rings. Her son, she finds sometimes in the gangs passing home from the primary school at the end of the road. The shove and snigger of them. The new unchildlike smell. And sometimes she sees them in her own face as she stares into the mirror after a night of broken milk-downed sleep, and counts the new lines around her eyes.
And she supposes, they are with Tom too. And she hopes that this is a solace and not a haunting.”
― Claire Gleeson, Show Me Where It Hurts