ash > Recent Status Updates

“We have to write what’s true… But!… sometimes truth is relative, because we also have to write what’s compelling… is the truth compelling?
Yes… She believed that her truth was enough.
Of corse it isn’t, said Yale.
Of course not, she repeated…
The truth… is unwieldy, messy, long, and yes, boring… The not boring truth… we pluck and combine and deftly chisel… until it takes shape”

“There was knowing someone and then there was knowing someone. The first kind was knowing what someone tended to do. The second more intimate knowing: what someone would never do.”

“And then you left. It doesn’t matter what came between us as much as it matters that you left… You looked like a man in love… and what you didn’t say is that love of yours had conditions.”

“He was a real person, despite all the facts, the transcripts, the lawyers and gavel slams that had followed. Despite the way he had scared her.”

“you know I’m an emotional guy, but I don’t get emotional when it comes to things like this. People die every day. Good people. I almost died, remember- as a kid. You think kids deserve to die? So what if he died… he ruined kids. He nearly ruined you. He shit away his one precious life, so figure it that way. They call this a comeuppance.”

“I don’t want you to go, I said, testing her. I knew Trace would go, she had to go… prep [a] campaign that would pay our rent- but I also needed her to resist, ready to drop anything for me. Ready to leave her job. Her life. Anything. To love was to pretend”

“trees bent and swooned from a bay breeze like the world was stirred by the spoon of God. With the car windows down and my feet on the dash, I thought, I could be a real person, like this. Maybe one day. Maybe starting today. That’s what Whidbey was for. My body was capable of calm when I let it in, when the radio played loud enough to suck oxygen from the flares of mind, when I could relax enough to just be”

“her performance of mourning. Because that’s how it felt to her in that moment, like a performance. Her pinkened eyes darted from face to face, because she thought they should, because she wanted everyone to know something of her pain, of the unjustness of the whole terrible ordeal”

“direct eye contact meant two things: aggression or respect. often, she’d found, it was a little of both”

“the teachers and parole officers and correctional officers and correctional officers and social workers and Your Honors, and the systems of selective lifeboats (MONEY! It’s always the money!)”

“nothing puts pressure on the legal system quite like public opinion”

“He thought it very discouraging that his wife, who was the sole object of his existence, evinced so little interest in things which concerned him, and valued so little his conversation”
I see how that would be very discouraging

“Robert talked a good deal about himself. He was very young, and did not know any better”
and some people never learn

“It was some utter nonsense; some adventure out there in the water, and they both tried to relate it at once. It did not seem half so amusing when told”
old timey you just hadta be there

“The truth had a way of sprouting new roots into a person’s mind, demanding their own reflection, their own space, too dark for them to comprehend unless it had happened to them, too, and even then, even if they knew the feeling-… they’d wander quick and deep inside themselves into their own entropic past, leaving no more room for me”

“The worst part of being alive has always been my general loathing of people but my sporadic, frantic need for them. New people I needed even more. With new people I could try out anything… without these rare occasions, I feared I would never exist again, could never be somebody else”

“I never went to the Sichuan province of China, where my father was born and raised, never smelled the fermented howl of chilies drifting in his hometown’s air. I never saw the humped Appalachian Mountains of my mother’s life before me, purple and immediate. I only knew where I was from and the escape routes that followed.”

“the one true current of survivors, this suffocating loneliness… but still, i ache for a connection. It feels like very little to ask”

“Mary-Beth would learn in the weeks to come how to be offended for her boy after his death, because only by death could she finally find the traction, the right”

“In the window, cut by the banister, a hook of midnight so flooded by moon it was as if i was right in the pith of the world. maybe there would be a life for me after all this, a reason for Whidbey, a purpose, a tomorrow.
Safety - would i know it if I ever felt it?”

“the once wasn’t once but something viciously ongoing, the movie villain thrown from a window or shot ten times, and yet- the gasp. The eye, opening. Always, a resuscitation. Furiously alive.
Whidbey was supposed to fix all that”

“None of this’s linear, what’s the rush?”

“I’d never needed an audience or judge or jury to name my suffering to know its volume and realness; it happened to me, and I could never, would never, capitalize on it”

“Does he deserve to die?
He doesn’t deserve to live.
That’s the same thing, Rich said.
I don’t think it is, actually”

“we were all trying, all the time, I reminded myself. That’s how we become the people we are, impressionistically, chiseling lumps of selfhood off the truer, moldering form. There was always the effort to prove, though only certain people got to do so with pleasure. I tried to reel empathy from any part of myself”

“the walls of a person’s heart are not impregnable, not if they have ever known love”

“‘I have nothing to live for.’ I say this without even a note of self-pity. I am simply stating a fact.
‘Then you have nothing to lose. That puts you in a position of power.’…
‘I’m nobody’s idea of a hero, Haymitch. But at least I’m still in the game.’”

“She can’t stand for anything to be confined. Especially wild things, which, of course, she is.”

“A sister is someone you fight with and fight for. Tooth and nail.”

“How do I know? I feel like I constantly demonstrate poor judgment. I don’t feel qualified to choose between fried or scrambled eggs.”
me as fuck