Marcy

“Looking back, having been through trauma again as an adult (Go wait in the car), I can see another side to my mother’s actions back then. Because now I know that in the months after something so devastating, everything feels like sleepwalking. Life becomes a stuporous fulfillment of routine where even walking to the supermarket feels like you’re dragging your limbs through air as heavy as the Drying Room’s. Every basic task starts to feel like a decision, and that becomes so draining that you end up unable to make any of them. It’s winding up in the kitchen without knowing why you went in there. It’s taking us to swim school on a Tuesday instead of tennis. It’s getting two haircuts, not because you’re busy, but because you forgot we went yesterday. Our routine was intended to keep us busy, sure, but the repetition was a comfort against the burden of decision-making. A burden that, I know now, our mother wore heavily.”
― Benjamin Stevenson, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone

“If genocide is ultimately an act of erasure, denial is its final, comprehensive deed.”
― Serj Tankian, Down with the System: A Memoir