Status Updates From Unbearable Splendor

“I am known to be ungrateful. I am points that will eventually meet in space. I am singular but there are more of me.”

“I’ve seen what happens when women take up space.”

“Honey, can you pick up some eggs on the way home? / Her children are 40, 30, 20, 10, 5, 1 / After she dies, her eggs can still be used. A body so quiet”

“At last. Light all around us, my body a room of lamps, every wick lit as though it were the world’s last birthday. Time is now inside me, transfer and possession, never holding anything back, indifferent to my illegitimacy, disinterested in my grief, pieced with all of my joy.”

“Third Sphere (Venus: The Lovers)
In my saddlebag I carried hearts that I had found among the crowds aboveground. I carved my name on their surprisingly tough surfaces as though they were picnic tables—a pastoral banquet waiting for me.”

“My dream was to reach paradise, wherever it was.”

“First Sphere (The Moon: The Inconstant)
When I was a child I had a rocking horse, a horse on thick springs, its mane ever tousled in the exact same way, day after year. I would ride it into a hole in the ground that opened just for me, just for my horse and me. The passage of time below was inconstant, while time above rocked back and forth on its unseen springs.”

“...A foreign object with no memory of your gills. You burn in the icy water. Your last image is of a beautiful woman you saw on a street once: she left a wake of terror you reared back from as if it were fire.”

“8. Every woman is a source of terror. She is sublime, she gives chase like the white whale and will destroy your ship and bring you down with her, tethered by a sewing needle. You break the surface of the water and become something else.”

“5. You would like to devour permanence and dissolve it in your many stomachs. You would like to replace your skin when you grow weary of its memories, everything that seeps in it and never passes through, never evaporates.
6. This woman is a disappointment. Can she be exchanged, can she be returned, can she be reborn. Douse it again.”

“2. dear future clones I love you more—than I love myself because there are more of you—than there are of me although I am your mother—and your sister and your ancestor—and look in the mirror of your young face—and look behind you at my olding face—and you can do something only prophets can do—which is to see into the future—“

“16. I didn’t know I wasn’t human. My past was invented, implanted, and accepted. I’m more real than you are because I know I’m not real.
17. Empty orchestra. You can see through me, you can trust me. I have nothing to hide, I’m right here, I’m not going anywhere.”

“13. In the future, no one is completely human. Some people never tire of upgrading. I wanted wings until all the countries moved into the air.”

“6. To be worth less and less as you grow older, to be an old, cheap child.”

“A disobedient woman. A machine at home.”

“When I think of myself as mostly machine, my disobedience becomes completely natural. Tiresias was at one time a woman, and now he sees everything. He remembers the future.”

“Many of us know something about transgression. Something is wrong about us. What can we do but embrace the makeshift, assemble ourselves as we go, sometimes the punishment exceeding the crime.”

“Unheimlich, Freud’s word. Un-home-like.”

“Every time I see her I eat all her technology and spit the death out; it is hers alone, she fought for it, and she made it herself with her own veil. What is the last thing each of us will wear on our last day?”

“...A kind of blackness that fades outward but has a sound. It has the sound of a wall, a thick wall, and we can hear muffled voices on the other side. They are so close, if only they knew we were here, in this room.”

“We need more than eight minutes to get back to our body before it was a body; when it was our origin. We think that if we keep trying to get closer and closer to those non-memories that we will go back in time and change the course of events.

But there’s nothing but blankness.”

“The Big Bang. Matter exploding and each particle drifting away from one another. A family as a triangle. Drifting lines: This [mother-father-child] triangle will never be reassembled. All of these ghostly relationships.”