Status Updates From Ansia

Much more my speed than the book I was just trying to read

11

Rereading now that im not a silly lil 3rd yr

I first encountered this collection on the September 2023 ACT, and I liked it so much that I immediately went home and added it to my TBR. So here I am, almost 3 years later, reading this work.

Funny to think, it takes place in New York. Little did I know I'd end up there just a year later, thanks to that ACT score.

The past sees through all attempts at disguise. That night I was awakened by my sister’s scream. … The full moon shone through the window…. I heard my sister sob and then fell silent. I looked carefully at the door, but I noticed nothing. Then I understood that his ghost would never visit me. I was, one might say, the lucky daughter. But I lay awake until morning, waiting; part of me is waiting still.

Sansan had nowhere else to go. Nothing remained of the stories and meals and people they’d known, nothing but what they remembered. Their world lived in them, and they would be the end of it. They had no solace, and no burden, but each other.

He looked over his shoulder to make sure that Charles was still asleep and would not hear the conversation. “Is something wrong?” he asked.
“We’re getting old,” she said. “How will we make the space in our minds for everything we’ll need to learn here?”
Without a pause, he answered her, “We will forget.”

Somehow I had lost both of my daughters. If I had learned English, I wondered, would I have been able to follow them? I will never know. But my daughters turned into women and I was left behind, stumbling after their voices.

It was as if I were a member of a dying tribe, and those with whom I cared to communicate were growing fewer and fewer. But who does not experience this as they grow older…. Haven’t we all, as time continues, found that we must be kind to ourselves and listen to our thoughts, because fewer and fewer of those remain who know what is most real to us?