Status Updates From Yksinäisyyttä kalliimpaa

They were not her stories. They were not about her time, or her people, but what she had once found in these stories-escape-would eventually become her wisdom. Perhaps if she kept these tales going he would one day forgive her stubbornness in choosing solitude, because he, kinder than solitude, was always here for her until death do them apart.

...Once and again we lie to ourselves about starting with a clean slate, but even the most diligent wiping leaves streaks—fears, distrusts, the necessity of forever questioning the motives of others.

How does anyone know anything about another person? Our mind, a slate that does not begin as large as we wish, grows smaller with what we believe to be experience: anything we put down has to be erasable, one passion making way for another, one connection replaced by an equally precarious one...

Could he explain to Sizhuo that sometimes death was a mercy—that it was worse for the dead to go on living? In an ideal world, death should be the end of the story, but in this world, where they had to make do with muddles, death never ended anything neatly.

Why, thought Boyang with a weary sadness, couldn’t people stay in a place they could not name, rather than wanting to know, always wanting to know, more of the truth? Everything comes to an end when explained, rightly or wrongly.

Call it youthful conceit, but to be seen—and to be seen as someone with a past and a future—is that not our most sincere design for love? Our greediest, too: in wishing for such continuity, one places oneself—with arrogance and delusion—beyond the erosion of time.

Yet how could she explain that being on her own—and not someone’s property—was the only thing she had wanted? Once upon a time, she had been her parents’ possession, however momentarily, and after that she had belonged to her grandaunts, in whose minds she had belonged more to their god than to them; all sorts of people had since tried to claim her, but to stay unclaimed was to be never disowned again.

If she (Ruyu) had ever felt anything close to passion, it was a passion of the obliterating kind: any connection made by another human being, by accident or by intention, had to be erased; the void she maintained around herself was her only meaningful possession.

Those who are lied to are the ones to whom truth matters, don’t you think?

She was not the only one trapped by life. She was afraid of meeting another person like her, but more than that she was afraid of never meeting another person like her, who, however briefly, would look into her eyes so that she knew she was not alone in her loneliness.

Life, in retrospect, can be as simple as a collection of anecdotes, and anecdotally we live on, trading our youthful belief in happiness—and at that age happiness almost always means being good, being right, and being loved—for the belief in feeling less, suffering little.

One’s mind, fooled by pride, does not recognize the wisdom that comes from sorrow. Prematurely one rushes for the remedy of dignity, not knowing that dignity, rather than rejection, turns one’s heart into a timid organ, pleading for protection.

one’s life could have only one beginning, and that happened at birth. When people talk about starting over, it’s only wishful thinking: what came before, what happened yesterday, did not come or happen in vain.

sometimes she felt as though she was living from a long way off. Why couldn’t anyone detect the hollow echo of her voice when she spoke?

To start a life with a new language is like being returned to childhood—no one is really interested in your thoughts; all the world wants is for you to be contentedly occupied or else safely tucked away.

No, solitude she did not have; what she had was a never-ending quarantine.

One can always go back to another moment in history to negate the present; only the impressionable and the inexperienced—are liable to christen a moment memory.

Perhaps there is a line in everyone’s life that, once crossed, imparts a certain truth that one has not been able to see before, transforming solitude from a choice into the only possible state of existence.

One could easily trace a life lived in solitude. The footprints, though invisible, were not hard for her to see: the steps to the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom, all taken out of necessity.

No, to be in the middle requires one to be practical: one does not walk away from a stable job; one does not take a sojourn from life. Yet was it her true position to be in the middle—without a future to look forward to, was she, despite her age, already at the end?

What he’d called her life was only a way of not living, and by doing that, she had taken, here and there, parts of other people’s lives and turned them into nothing along with her own.

Extreme disappointment seems a lesson one can never master: no matter how many times it had happened, the realization would still hit her like a fierce bout of physical illness, and for a moment she would be dazed, asking herself how it could be that her life had not turned out to be a place for that happiness.

But how does one tell where one’s true self stops and makes way for all the borrowed selves?

It takes courage to find solace in trivialities, willfulness not to let trivialities usurp one’s life. Trivialities, though, could wait now, or could be done away with forever.

But what did coffee smell like? No family in the quadrangle would squander their money on a jar of either brand, and it occurred to Moran only then that she had never thought about what made the actresses look blissful. How many people watching the commercials would know the fragrance of coffee? Perhaps that’s what happiness is like, looking more real when it is scripted and performed by others.

In her despondence, unknown to herself, Moran held out seeking hands to her friends: a smile, an affectionate gesture, a wordless affirmation—it does not take much to save one from despair, but they, untouched by the urgency devouring her, watched the dusk fall in their intimate obliviousness.

Yet people do not die until they are made to. An infant for whom no love can be found in her parents’ hearts, if left in the wilderness, will cry until her voice grows hoarse; it is not in our nature to expire quietly.