Abby

“I can’t become smaller to fit into a crouching love in somebody else’s meager world. I don’t do that anymore. I have calmed down. I have consolidated. I have come through the reckoning that I required.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“I’m lonely,” he says aloud, and the silence of the apartment absorbs the words like blood soaking into cotton.

He is so lonely that he sometimes feels it physically, a sodden clump of dirty laundry pressing against his chest. He cannot unlearn the feeling.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“I have been so careless with the words I already have.

I don’t remember how to say home
in my first language, or lonely, or light.

I remember only
delam barat tang shodeh, I miss you,

and shab bekheir, goodnight.

How is school going, Kaveh-joon?
Delam barat tang shodeh.

Are you still drinking?
Shab bekheir.

For so long every step I’ve taken
has been from one tongue to another.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“I am that mysterious stranger that I hoped to meet. I met her at a dark dance. We came here to live together until I could stay by myself. The place is here. The time is now. This is all my lifetime.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds