Sally Grace > Recent Status Updates

“Listen I can see you. If you are like me. You do not deserve most of what has happened or will. But there is something I can offer you. Whoever you are. Out there. As lonely as it gets, you are not alone. There is another kind of love.
It's the love of art. Because I believe in art the way other people believe in god…This book? It's for you. It's water I made a path through...Come in. The water will hold you.”

“Or is she in the heat itself, the dry whisper of wind pushing everything out and away... a woman's imagination burning a hole in her skull to get out? Did she nearly die waiting? Wanting? Is she in the sound of a southern drawl out the mouth of a woman, its dips and ahs making words go strange, beautiful?”

“It’s a small tender thing, the simplicity of loving.”

“My god. How many ways are there to love men?
It's enough to break a heart open.
The images in my head and heart. I know what they are. I do. They are a family album. It is possible to make family any way you like. It is possible to love men without rage. There are thousands of ways to love men.”

“It is possible to carry life and death in the same sentence. In the same body. It is possible to carry love and pain. In the water, this body I have come to slides through the wet with a history. What if there is hope in that.”

“The grinning of life and joy finally coming to you when all you knew was how to suffer.”

“He treated this thing I'd done - this DUI - the dead baby - the failed marriages - the rehab - the little scars at my collar bone-my vodka - my scarred as shit past and body- as chapters of a book he wanted to hold in his hands and finish.”

“With Virginia Woolf there will perhaps be a long walk in a garden or along a shore, perhaps a walk that will last all day. She will put her arm in yours and gaze out. At your backs will be history. In front of you, just the ordinary day, which is of course your entire life. Like language. The small backs of words.
Stretching out horizonless.”

“Aspiration gets stuck in some people. It's difficult to think yes. Or up. When all you feel is fight or run.
If I could go back, I'd coach myself. I'd be the woman who taught me how to stand up, how to want things, how to ask for them. I'd be the woman who says, your mind, you imagination, they are everything. Look how beautiful. You deserve to sit at the table. The radiance falls on all of us.”

“I was not alone…some of them would become rich and famous and some of them would go to jail and some of them would become accountants and some would join the Peace Corps or move to France and some of them would fall in love and some of them would kill themselves and everyone who'd wronged us and everyone we'd been and everyone we would be all meeting in books. All touching the skin of words. What is a family.”

“Endless stories of a woman who was me and is also all of us. Our bodies the flesh metaphor for all human experience. This happened to me. This is where I failed. Where I went blind. Where I opened my legs. Where I chewed off my hand. Where I tried to off myself, or offer myself up as useful, or deigned to ask for love, or ventured into pleasure or pain. Or just got drunk & fucked up. Again. Here are the scars.”

“you said you would love me until I died you said we would die together in love you said when I was 75 we'd laugh our saggy skinned laughs and drink to our old ass love you said it to me you did every year until you stopped saying it where are you where is the man who would love a woman like me there are no men if not you there never were any men for me not even a father”

“Always we were making. Making love, making trouble. making art. We made performance art together. He made paintings and I made stories. He made dinner and I made money. It seemed like all that making had a power bigger than our dumb lives. Making and making.
Art. The expression of human imagination. Or emotions that have been locked inside a body spilled out all over the goddamn place.”

“That image of Joan of Arc burning up in a fire burned inside me like a new religion. Her face skyward. Her faith muscled up like a holy war. And always the voice of a father in her head.
Like me. Jesus. What is a thin man pinned to wood next to the image of a burning woman warrior ablaze? I took the image of a burning woman into my heart and left belief to the house of father forever.”

“For three days and three nights I prayed to the thing called god so hard I choked on the spit in my mouth. I clenched my hands until they went red. I dug my fingernails into flesh so hard little scarlet moons appeared. I shut my eyes so tight I thought my forehead would bleed. My head, my heart, everything on the inside was burning.”

“I think that everyone that knew Kesey knew him differ-ently. Maybe that's true about all larger than life people, or it may be that no one really ever knows them at all - we just have experiences near them and claim them as our own. We say their names and wish that something intimate is coming out of our mouths. But intimacy isn't like in books or movies.”

“Before my father was my father he was a boy.
Just a boy.
Before I hated him I loved him.”

“Sometimes I'd just stand at the top of the blue carpet stairs and look down into the throat of them wishing I could see her… my throat knotting up I'd give up. Even if I ventured half way down the stairs solo, I'd start to get light headed and the skin on my chest would heat up. I'd hold the railing for dear life and say her name into space. Hoping she would come retrieve me.”

“Damaged women? We don't think we deserve kindness. In fact, when kindness happensto us, we go a little berserk. It's threatening. Deeply. Because ifl have to admit how profoundly I need kindness? I have to admit that I hid the me who deserves it down in a sadness well...Like abandoning a child…because it's better than the life she is facing. Not quite killing my little girl me, but damn close.”

“Nothing nothing nothing nothing about me deserved it. But very deep down in me, very tiny, very afraid, was a girl who smiled from within the cavernous place I'd hidden her.
Is that love? Was it? I still don't know. It's possible. of us are any good at naming it. It comes and then goes. Like songs do. I do know this: it's the kind of thing that happens in stories.”

(Cont. from last progress update)

“Her first round.
I know that will well now. It's the will of certain mothers and daughters. It comes from living in bodies that can carry life or kill it.
It's the will to end.”

“It's just that I have a sister who walked around for nearly two years when she was 17 with razor blades in her purse seeing if she could outlive the long wait waiting to get out of family.
Her first round.
It's just that I had a mother who ate a whole bottle of sleep. ing pills at middle age with only her daughter the swimmer at home to witness the will of it.”

(Cont. in next progress update)

“I didn't know yet how wanting to die could be a bloodsong in your body that lives with you your whole life. I didn't know how deeply my mother's song had swum into my sister & into me. I didn't know something like wanting to die could take form in one daughter as the ability to quietly surrender, & in the other as the ability to drive into death head-on. I didn't know we were our mother's daughters after all.”

“To be born has many meanings. How many times we leave a life, enter a new one. How it felt to fly out of the airport away from my family's home at 18: watch the airport grow tiny and then the land go smaller and then the strip of shitty sand that is Florida recede and disappear. Girl in the sky weightless as water.”

“My sister and I, we were selfish. We wanted selves. There was no rage or love that could stop us.”

“You will see you have an underlying tone and plot to your life underneath the one you've been told. Circular and image bound. Something near tragic, near unbearable, but contained by your irreducible imagination - who would have thought of it but you…The rocks. They carry the chronology of water. All things simultaneously living and dead in your hands.”

“If I had known how this story would end, would I have done anything differently? Would I still have loved her, body and soul?
In my mind's eye, I can see Camilla asking me that very question.
Oh, my darling, I feel my heart answer. I wouldn't change a single
thing.”