Sevi > Recent Status Updates

It's freezing - an extraordinary 0° Fahrenheit - and it's snowing, and in the language that is no longer mine, the snow is qanik - big, almost weightless crystals falling in clumps and covering the ground with a layer of pulverized white frost.

Any word or sound bursts the second it hits the air and then it shatters in our faces. We’re exposed. Our honesty renders us ugly and irredeemable.

most men were a kind of noise pollution, something akin to TV static

A novel is a body of water from which I frantically wanted to drink.

I can appreciate the urge to create, but so far I feel like the author didn't necessarily have anything in particular to say, and they threw their unrefined ideas onto a page to see what stuck (not much, for the time being).

a novel is a gust of life from another world

She was of the perspective that one could occupy the centre and bring the margin into its folds, to remake from within. But to me that had always seemed like an incitement to disaster. I had been born into a so-called margin; to me and my kin it was always-already the centre, one among many.

The body riots and I’m inside it, bearing witness, interpreting, translating, emoting

Do you know what you’re saying to me? That my suffering is an economic privilege. What a brutal worldview, I said to River, that everything has a kind of exploitable value, regardless of its personal toll.

I’d been experiencing life as a problem of form: it is difficult to live in a world that corrodes freedom

'I guess you could say I'm turning into a bug. I just want to be left alone to curl up out of sight, somewhere underground.' Ok Miss Gregor Samsa

She had no desire to go back to them ['normal' mornings], no desire to change the way things were now. When stones lying warm in the sun were turned over, they exposed the cold, damp earth underneath; and that was where Masako had burrowed deep. There was no trace of warmth in this dark earth, yet for a bug curled up tight in it, it was a peaceful and familiar world.

From his secondfloor window, the city outside seemed to be divided between the places brilliantly lit by the midsummer sun and those sunk in shadow.

Though the umbrella created a pink cocoon, her surroundings became more sinister and depressing. Somehow, this seemed like a symbol of her own life now that she had killed Kenji.

Those who analyze, murder. I’m sure you knew that, Professor.
Those who read carefully, dismember.
We all kill.

beware of me, my love
beware of the silent woman in the desert
of the traveler with an emptied glass
and of her shadow’s shadow

Yes, I write. Also. Also for pleasure, like running. To get somewhere. Utilitarianly. To get to the end of the page, I mean. Not for exercise. If you know what I mean: it’s life or death.

In trying to get people to see your humanity, you reveal just that: your humanity. Your fundamentally problematic nature. All the unique and terrible ways in which people can, and do, fail.

One day, a bird slammed into my studio window. I was sitting on a yoga ball and tumbled backward in terror. Almost every residency I’ve had since, I’ve found at least one stunned bird sprawled on the ground outside my workspace. I learned: they never see the glass coming. They only see the reflection of the sky.

Putting language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat.

I didn’t know her, not really, until I did. She was a stranger because something essential was shielded, released in tiny bursts until it became a flood—a flood of what I realized I did not know. Afterward, I would mourn her as if she’d died, because something had: someone we had created together.

This is how you are toughened, the newest wife reasoned. This is where the tenacity of love is practiced; its tensile strength, its durability. You are being tested and you are passing the test; sweet girl, sweet self, look how good you are; look how loyal, look how loved.

We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity. That is to say, queers—real-life ones—do not deserve representation, protection, and rights because they are morally pure or upright as a people.

You were suspicious of their feelings because you had no reason to love yourself—not your body, not your mind. You rejected so much gentleness. What were you looking for?

What gets left behind? Gaps where people never see themselves or find information about themselves. Holes that make it impossible to give oneself a context. Crevices people fall into. Impenetrable silence.

What is placed in or left out of the archive is a political act, dictated by the archivist and the political context in which she lives.

The word archive, Jacques Derrida tells us, comes from the ancient Greek ἀρχεῖον: arkheion, “the house of the ruler.”

Sometimes stories are destroyed, and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place; either way something very large is irrevocably missing from our collective histories.

Devils at home, devil in the woods, devils at church, devils everywhere, is there no escape?