Julia Billard > Recent Status Updates

I don’t like this book, but I’m gonna finish it because I’ve committed

“ some mornings I didn’t leave the bed because then I’d have to brush my teeth, followed by a series of actions that amounted to living my life as the person I was. I was unable to drum up positivity about either dental hygiene or the rest of my day, so I told myself I was disgusting and lazy and I’d be late and they’d fire me and then I got up.”

“ I sit in the garden and watch the birds dart around the feeder. Today is almost done. The sky is apricot with golden clouds. A chorus of grasshoppers surround me. The Earth is alive. I am alive. I wait to feel whatever I meant to feel but nothing comes.”

“last time, I cried and complained and made a fuss, I lost him. I will not let that happen again, so I shove my concern down and everything that isn’t my perky tits or my warm, wet vagina. Those are his but everything else everything that’s unappealing to him that’s too needy and too emotional and too sensitive… that might lead to another breakup, I keep to myself and scream it into a pillow later.”

“ let me know how beautiful I am… To him always to him, not realizing this isn’t actually compliment to me, but a way of showing that he is the judge, the one with the eyes that discern the beautiful from the ugly, the one able to grant beauty where he sees fit and I’m just the one lucky enough to have been granted it”

“Nothing turns me on like a man who’s not really there.”

“No matter how much a grown man wants a woman who can read a book he wants her to be able to suck a dick too.”

She wonders whether she should just roll over and let it happen. She knows that she will lose him. If she never relent she knows that she would lose herself she does she pictures him staying, bending to her will regretting it for the rest of his years. The image breaks her heart, perhaps loving someone means ruining your own life instead of theirs.

This. Is. An. Amazing. Scene.

“Despair laced through with so much incredible beauty. We just keep showing up for each other even through the mystery of other people’s grief. What else is there?”

“It’s almost painful the way little children just trustingly hold out their hearts for you to look at the way they haven’t learned yet how to conceal what matters to them even if it’s just chewing gum or flushed dolphin or plastic binoculars.”

“He fell asleep soon after, and I watched him. Not the affectionate gaze of a lover, but the frantic, anxious stare of someone truing to bend spoons with their mind”

149

“I imagined him pulling away, feeling the pressure of my request, the expiration date of my immigration. The panic at losing him took over…and pulled him close to me. It was the first time we had sex where I felt aware of wanting to impress him, keep him. Of wanting to put on a show. I felt myself becoming louder, more performative. I remember looking down during it and thinking he looked confused”

“I was twenty and needed two things: to be in love and to be taken seriously”

Pg 14

“Now I was home again. Incapable of directing my own life. I might as well be a piece of furniture. They talk and whisper and put me where they wish.”

Ok I get that they’re uninhibited and intimate, but I don’t want to read about pee stuff

Quirky millennial writing nooooooo

Dude this is not good. Would dnf if it wasn’t such a quick read. Repetitive and all over the place.

“It was like he didn’t believe I could navigate the world, and the less he believed it, the more difficult I found it to do”

“But then he’d come back, and I was animated by his eyes. I blossomed and was real, and what I did mattered. If he liked something about me, then I liked it too.”

“I don’t make any demands on him, emotional or otherwise. I was casual, noncommittal, the sort of girl he wanted me to be. But not really-no-not really. Inside, I was trying to attach myself onto him with enough hooks, like a burr, so he couldn’t just pick me off”

Why him!??!??

“I loved being a student actor. I was fully devoted to it, and now I’m not. I think if I’d become a professional, I would likely have fallen out of love with it anyway. It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives.”

I love Marx’s perspectives on life and attachment.

“Sam’s doctor said to him ‘the good news is that the pain is in your head’

But I am in my head, sam thought”

“Recently, she suspected he was losing interest in her. So, she had attempted to make herself more interesting.” Ugh :(

“I’m here, I said, and it felt shockingly comforting, those words. When I’m panicked, I say them aloud to myself. I’m here. I don’t usually feel that I am. I feel like a warm gust of wind could exhale my ash and I’d be disappeared forever.”

Want to like so bad but nothing is happening and I’m so very bored!

“I don’t feel like a person at all: I am something to be loaded and unloaded, like a sofa or a cuckoo clock. I am something to be tossed into a junkyard, thrown into the river, if necessary. I don’t feel real anymore. I feel like I could disappear.”