Madison

“I write short stories because I am one.
I wish I was a novel.
Breaths away from midnight, I know my final chapter is close.
I look up at Valentino, wondering what life could’ve offered if I had more pages in me.”
― Adam Silvera, The First to Die at the End

“I'm sixteen years old. I'm supposed to have all the time in the world!”
― Axie Oh, The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea

“That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always.”
― Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit

“By the end of that semester of free therapy, I was very tired of talking about myself. I was tired of myself. Each week I dutifully showed up, because I was supposed to, and relitigated whatever I had talked about the previous week. Replaying the details of that night demystified it, at least in terms of my involvement. More accurately, noninvolvement, because how could it have ended any differently? That was just the historian trying to wedge himself into a story that was not his.
Talking so much did nothing to lessen the fact that I missed you, and that I could now periodize different eras of that feeling. I miss missing you circa Oct 98, I wrote in my journal. I miss not watching my back, I miss going out for dinner at night, I miss your balcony and cultivating minor league tobacco habits.
I missed that feeling of having once known exactly what to say. That feeling of writing a series of perfect sentences. In a sense, I was still, years later, stepping down from the podium at the funeral home, shuffling slowly back to my seat in the pews between Anthony and Sean. But this was exactly why Derrida resisted the eulogy form. It’s always about “me” rather than “we,” the speaker burnishing his emotional credentials rather than offering a true account of the deceased.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True