Lauren Lee > Recent Status Updates

“There was no sound save the cry of a bird seeking some lonelier tree”

Now there was only the liquid shadow of the cloud, the buffeting of the rain, a single darting spear of sunshine, or the sudden bruise of the rainstorm. Solitary trees marked distant hills like obelisks.

The blazing hot soul of horror in these films was the restriction and controlling of women's bodies, minds, and rights... The true horror of the films was not ultimately otherworldly but domestic.

You are not listening to me. You are making phrases about Byron. And while you gesticulate, with your cloak, your cane, I am trying to expose a secret told to nobody yet; I am asking you (as I stand with my back to you) to take my life in your hands and tell me whether I am doomed always to cause repulsion in those I love?

There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to the star, ‘consume me.’

My blood must be bright red, whipped up, slapping against my ribs. I see every blade of grass very clear. But the pulse drums so in my forehead, behind my eyes, that everything dances the net, the grass; your faces leap like butterflies; the trees seem to jump up and down. There is nothing staid, nothing settled in this universe. All is rippling, all is dancing; all is quickness and triumph.

Did I all her life keep a baffle between us?
Did I prefer not to hear what she was actually saying?
Did it frighten me?

“I find many engraved invitations to the weddings of people who are no longer married. I find many mass cards from the funerals of people whose faces I no longer remember. In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.“

I have grown old (with only half a behind) in misery and shame, but I have never forgotten that I am the daughter of a Pope. I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our most melancholy propensities; for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away?

“To me, a 13s -year-old Black girl, stalled by the Souch and Southern Black life style, the city was a state of beauty and a state of freedom. The fog wasn't simply the seamy vapors off the bay caught and penned in by hills, but a soft breath of anonymity that shrouded and cushioned the bashful traveler. I became dauntless and free of fears, intoxicated by the physical fact of San Francisco.”

Just my breath, carrying my words out, might poison people and they'd curl up and die like black fat slugs. I had to stop talking. I discovered that to achieve perfect personal silence all I had to do was to attach myself leechlike to sound. I walked into rooms where people were laughing, and I simply stood still-in the midst of the riot of sound. Silence would rush into the room because I had eaten all the sounds.

“I don't think she ever knew that a deep-brooding love hung over everything she touched. In later years I asked her if she loved me and she brushed me off with: "God is love. Just worry about whether you're being a good girl, then He will love you."”

They stood at the subway entrance, one of those hugging, crying couples in New York, ignored by everyone passing by, granted perfect privacy in the middle of a teeming city on a hot summer night.

“In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.”

I am once again reading the bell jar! but this time it is prep for my New York trip!

I was always bursting with words and feelings too big to contain but all the things I'd planned to say to her vanished the instant she opened the door and instead of being able to engage in conversation for even two minutes like a normal person, I would instead hover speechless and desperate three steps behind her, hands plunged in pockets, hating myself, while she walked barefoot looking hip, talking effortlessly

I had a strange feeling of being already dead, of moving in a vaster sidewalk grayness than the street or even the city could encompass, my soul disconnected from my body and drifting among other souls in a mist somewhere between past and present, pedestrians floating up strangely isolated and lonely before my eyes, blank faces plugged into earbuds and staring straight ahead under crushing, granite-colored skies

“You’d be surprised what small every day things can lift us out of despair.”

Everything was lost, I had fallen off the map: the disorientation of being in the wrong apartment, with the wrong family, was wearing me down, so I felt groggy and punch-drunk, weepy almost, like an interrogated prisoner prevented from sleeping for days.

THINGS WOULD HAVE TURNED out better if she had lived. As it was, she died when I was a kid; and though everything that's happened to me since then is thoroughly my own fault, still when I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life.