Status Updates From A Constellation of Ghosts: ...

The descriptive language is so beautiful and devastating, can’t wait to give this book a proper chance <3

“…there’s only so much time you will have breath to walk on feet on broken shifting earth.”

“Give me the quill this play has ended on this day your pen will write a different book where you will find without my shadow you can speak. Look, daughter, look, I am far away you cannot stay but I will watch will perch will wait and one day meet you greet you here again say it now unpack your throat put down this script don’t hesitate…”

“You can you can you see from sea to sea you see that you and me are moving—now I on tree and you and you and you remain on ground my sound within your throat my voice inside your heart, my daughter, we are not apart but we are separate separate separate separate we must be you and me must be from sea to sea you see I see you must know must know, daughter, I must go must go. Must. Go.”

“They don’t tell you illness remakes you into someone else. They want you to be who you were. Doctors. Family. Friends. But you will never be who you were. Don’t spend whatever time you have left trying to return to before. That’s a life lived backwards.”

“When I was in the hospital, you wrote and told me that you would keep my watch wound so time would not run out. I cried when I read that, and I still do, because time runs out, as we think of it, but the ideas, the shared love, and the caring for others guarantee us to be immortal. Time shrinks, but love expands.”

“All her weekend visits to this museum taught her that form shifts but life continues.
This is how she could remarry, my father in her heart, her new husband in her heart. She stretched while I solidified.”

“When we’ve spent two hours in only one room, I realize the challenge of the day. No one can read every plaque in this museum in one afternoon. We are going to have to choose what to see. We will not finish what we start.
Not in this museum. Not in this life.”

“Daughter, you will see what I can see that certificates and documents are meaningful only on the earth and that relationships exist outside of them. Do not bookmark things with date stamps they tell you nothing of what’s between them.”

“Rape was for alleys and alcohol and bars. Rape wasn’t for bedrooms with people you knew. Rape wasn’t for girls with a 4.0 GPA at college, who worked full time, who came from “good” families, who only occasionally fell down the stairs or fell asleep during class. I could have left him, I say to the hunter green door. To A34.”

“It turns out all it takes to leave is to let go.”

“Never time for the good-bye like you read about. Just one day something is there and the next minute it ain’t.”

“…because it is your own second life and it is up to you to make a friend of it a true companion a forever home inside your bones because once it has awakened it is most invested in your recognition of its needs.
Illness is a commitment.”

“We all have those two lives, daughter, the second one begins the moment you realize the first one will end and so the ghost you host once you have met the face of illness is your own and no amount of chanting changing begging pleading can remove it…”

“Choose how you will live with the ghosts that chose you.”

“Daughter, I can tell you one thing now that I could not tell you before what they do not tell you about illness is that it is a ghost.”

“I don’t remember you, but I always remember you.”

How true is this for someone who lost a loved one. 🥺

“I need to bring Death into my story, not hold Her at arm’s length until the ending.
Dear Death, how can we work together?”

“Death was excited. Ready. She’d been long napping, and the stretch awake felt good to Her. From this moment forward, whether I lived to be 100 or 51, She was no longer a silent passenger. She would be my closest companion. Maybe the tears are for that awakening—the hospital’s claws ripping open my belly compartment where Death sleeps next to the same place where Life begins.”

“Adaptation: humans’ greatest superpower. Even the most adverse conditions can be adapted to. This can help us survive and it can also kill us.”

That was true, and what I didn’t say was also true: I can’t have you hold me because I’ll see how my cancer diagnosis is scaring you and I’ll try to make you feel better because I want you to feel better but also because it will distract me from what I’m feeling, and I really need to only take care of me. I can’t divert my energy for you.

“Can’t I hold you?” he’d asked.
“No. Not until I’m done. I can’t risk stopping the emotion.”

“I think your daughter might know a thing or two about that pattern. She could not let you go so she pushed everything else away.
We have to find each other again, son, so we can help her do what we could not. Please wait for me. I am on my way.”

OMG

“When you took your family West away from us, she cried and tried to make you stay by guilting you about all we’d done for you. You took that as one more trick, one more manipulation, and it was, but under all that, son, she couldn’t see a world for herself without you in it. She simply could not let you go so she pushed you away instead.”