Dina Khatib > Recent Status Updates

“It is insupportable. It cannot be borne.”

“he can imagine her dark eyes on him, assessing, gathering information, like a spool gathers thread”

“she will see him for what he is, a man with his leg caught in the jaws of a trap”

“The problem is… that I have no talent for it. I cannot abide waiting.”

‘When,’ continues her brother, ‘has he ever exerted himself to give me something I want or need? When have you known him to act in my favour? When have you known him not to go deliberately out of his way to thwart me?’

“There is, she has found, great power to be had in silence. Which is something this brother of hers has never learnt.”

“She grows up with the awareness that she is merely tolerated, an irritant, useless, that she does not deserve love, that she will need to change herself substantially, crush herself down if she is to be married.”

“She looks at him for a moment, raises her eyebrows very slightly, as if she has seen the spool of his thoughts, as if his head is transparent as water.”

“It is the girl with the bird! The very same… Right here, in front of him, as if he had summoned her presence by thought alone.”

“As an astronomer reads the minuscule shifts and alterations in the alignment of the planets and spheres, to see what lies in store, this eldest son became an expert in reading his father’s moods and expressions.”

“Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns.”

“As time somehow kept moving, the various sizes of various concerns were starting to seem less relevant.”

“You know how when you’re trying to get some stuff out of your car and there’s, like, one too many things to bring them all in one trip?

Well, that’s the way my mind felt at that moment. Except instead of one too many world-shattering, life-altering unpleasantnesses, there were like five too many to hang on to.”

“Human beings are terrible at accepting uncertainty, so when we’re ignorant, we make assumptions based on how we imagine the world. And our guess is so obviously correct that other guesses seem, at best, willful ignorance—at worst, an attack.”

“It’s so much easier for people to get excited about this liking something than agreeing to like it.”

“The only thing I was getting used to was pretending like I was getting used to it.”

“When you get stuck fighting small battles, it makes you small.”

“It was just so… the same.”

“And, of course, I had no idea of this then, but by engaging with him, I was affirming him”

“These words came out like old, warm soda.”

“Knowing something is a bad idea does not always decrease the odds that you will do it.”

“I’m not much older now than I was then, but in a lot of ways, obviously, I’m a different person. So it is easy for me to recognize that I made some good decisions and some bad ones.”

“You can only do so much pretending before you become the thing you’re pretending to be.”

“deep down I was terrified. At some point that night, I glimpsed my most probable future. That one day, the most interesting and important thing about me would be a thing that I did a long time ago. That I would go on with my life doing boring UX design and people would say, “Oh! You were April May!” to me at parties and job interviews, as if I was once something but not anymore.”

“I need to make a decision. The kind of choice that you only get to make once and you can’t take back and it makes your life totally different, and even if the path is clear, it’s still deeply unsettling.”

“This is not fair,” I replied matter-of-factly.

“I keep wondering when you will notice that that’s how everything is,” she said with a smile.

“I don’t like that everyone has a price, but ultimately you do”

“You do things you have to do in the order you have to do them.”

“it just stood there, silent and almost scornful, like the world didn’t deserve its attention.”

“I hated it because the company’s time-management app was a dumb idea and didn’t actually help people, I hated it because I knew I was just doing it for money, and I hated it because they asked the staff to treat it like their whole life rather than like a day job.”