rrafa > Recent Status Updates

'I don't want to be anybody's girl; I want to be my own person. I wish I could stand up on my own.'

'I think soon I will like myself all the way through, and I won't mind what people think of me.'

'This confusion is torture, the unknowing is a hand on my throat, tightening. Lethal, glorious, inviting Hell. I want this Hell to last.'
I WANT THIS HELL TO LAST
I WANT THIS HELL TO LAST
I WANT THIS HELL TO LAST

'There is evil in my yearning, I know, I just can't see where yet.'

'The days go on this way, melting into one another while I drop deeper into her.'

(p. 784) 'He feels, as he increasingly does, that his life is something that has happened to him, rather than something he has had any role in creating'

(p. 750) 'the color of the sea from which one comes, the color of the sea to which one returns'

'and the blood from his nose was thick and hot and reassuring and the taste of it on his lips oddly nourishing, like soup, as if his body were something miraculous and self-healing, determined to save itself.'

"Pretend we're falling and we're clinging together from fear."

Finally

' "Well, the hardest thing about being a parent is recalibration. The better you are at it, the better you will be."
(...) We all say we want our kids to be happy, only happy, and healthy, but we don't want that. We want them to be like we are, or better than we are. We as humans are very unimaginative in that sense.'

"Why wasn't friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn't it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified."

'There were times when the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive, as if happiness were something that everyone should and could attain, and that any sort of compromise in its pursuit was somehow your fault.'

'Another advantage was that we could all three sit in front, and I never felt so friendly as when I am in a car, sharing the same pleasures, and perhaps even the same death.'

easy read / heavy topics

"He spent all his time trying to remember, as if memories could sustain him"

At the beginning this was so different from other Otessa books. But now, I'm home 💘

Yum yum yum

This book couldn't have picked a more perfect timing

So... I'm already crying

Hard to put it down

to the first paragraph of chapter 25, I'm so thankful

"So of course in the midst of everything, the state of the world being what it is, humanity on the cusp of extinction, here I am writing another email about sex and friendship. What else is there to live for?"