Cassidy Beamer > Recent Status Updates

“I desired her beyond reason, beyond self protection, beyond common sense, and it is just as difficult to call that love from afar as it is not to call it love when within it”

“How closely our lives drift past other lives; how narrowly we become ourselves and not some adjacent other, someone both near at hand and much too far away”

“But he didn’t know me anymore, as the trouble with knowing people is how the target keeps moving”

First audiobook and it’s working

This book takes place in Iowa City August of 2020, recounting the derecho and state/University COVID policies (or lack thereof), and it has been wild to relive. But also so special to read descriptions of this sweet city that I know and miss dearly. To know he’s describing the houses near Park Road and specific bars in town w/o him having to name it

“It was enough to sit in the living room in my pajamas and smell pancakes and be reassured that my father was special…if his talents, his magic, his legerdemain did t remain inimitable, unknowable, if they weren’t protected and preserved, what could he possibly be, to us, for us, what could he do?”

“My old feeling of stunned abandonment fit any loss, regardless of size”

“Being wanted enough would unlock a doorway to everything else I craved. This goal and its underlying hope preoccupied me for decades, for so long I forgot it existed. Hadnt I always just wanted to be pretty? Didn’t everyone want to be wanted? No, I had craved safety. Freedom from a vigilance that exhausted me.”

I have annotated so many sad faces while reading this book

Good and important for me to be reading

“Sometimes you need people to be perfect and they can’t be and you hate them forever for not being even though it wasn’t their fault and it’s not yours either. You just needed something they didn’t have in them to give you. And then in other people’s lives you do the same thing, you’re the person who let’s everyone down, who fails to make anything better, and you hate yourself so much”

Damn

“Companionable silences of friendship. They will go on facing side by side the awful shocks of life, offering one another when needs be the old comfortable blanket of tacit understanding. Say no more. Better not to speak. I understand.”

“The inexchangeable pleasure of her conversation. Just to walk the streets saying things, anything, just the act itself, walking together at the same speed, and talking, purely to amuse and please one another, to make each other stupidly laugh, for no further accomplishment, no higher purpose, to let their words rise and disperse forever in the damp brackish air.”

Been a minute!!!!!!

Dolly Alderton makes me feel sane and I’m grateful we have her to say the truths we’re all scared to say

“We aren’t loved in the ways we choose. We are loved in the ways we are loved.”

“All this time, our friendship had been teaching me about ongoingness—how intimacy holds friction alongside sustenance, how pain and proximity emerge from the same honesty.”

“She made solitude look liberating while others made it look like a grind. I knew the truth everyone knows, which is that it’s both.”

“Romance was what I’d always felt consumed by, but my relationships with women were the ones I trusted more. They built and rebuilt my inner architecture. The version of myself made possible by conversations with friends was the self I most readily recognized—the self that demanded the fewest contortions”

This book has a cadence that I’m lost inside of, very hard to put down.

“We had a thousand things, like everyone. But ours were only ours. Who will find them beautiful now?”

“I wanted it to work like a spell. You denied your doubt, and then it disappeared. My desire to feel certain was so strong it started to feel like certainty itself.”