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The horrors of that place felt powerless in comparison to my longing for memory.

This was said with a smile, as if the fact of finding in your family tree an innocent woman murdered on grounds of delusional allegations were a cute little anecdote for dinner-party gossip. And it begs the question: which other mass crime, even one long-past, is it possible to speak of like this—with a smile?

he listed the names of dozens of the city's women who were burned as witches in the public square. "Many of Bruges' inhabitants still bear these surnames and, before visiting the exhibition, they had no idea they could have an ancestor accused of witchcraft," the museum's director commented in the documentary Dans le sillage des sorcières de Bruegel.

It hurts
to see how i’ve
betrayed myself
trying to save
the souls of men
who do not want
to be saved
it hurts to see
how my legacy
will only rest
in the space
between my legs

• the book of mary magdalene

J’ai déjà pleuré deux fois 😭

'So you're his wife?' the man said, moving his eyes up and down her body as though
he were trying to guess her worth.

She said that I was also the person who double-cleaned the coffee machine. I protested that no one cleaned it properly, and she laughed and said that I was both chaos and order.

And then she heard [Zeus’] hated voice, telling her she could not escape him. She already knew what she had to do to make the pain stop. Submit to
another pain. Beaten at last, she gave in and reverted to her original form.
As Zeus raped her, she thought of being an eagle.

If anyone had thought to ask her why, she might have said that the pleasure she took in his attention was always slightly tainted by the feeling she had that in addition to his charm, which was always on show to her, he was capable of devastating cruelty.

Hera found herself in the upsetting position of being worried about her husband. She had no experience of this: the greatest threat to Zeus’s wellbeing was usually her.

Medusa looked back at [Athene’s] statue. 'I wonder what she'd say about you [Poseidon],' she said.
I'm sure she would say that I am handsome and charming and that you should stop wondering if you could reach the door before I reached you, because you already know the answer is no?'

Two fires informed me, […]
left charred marks now around which I try to grow

Écrire nécessitait une intimité avec elle-même qu'elle ne se donnait plus.
Son nouveau bureau était inspirant, elle avait l'espace pour le faire mais n'osait pas s'enfermer pour écrire. Disparaître des heures durant.
Être ailleurs.
Dans cette chambre en soi où se terraient et proliféraient d'effrayantes créatures qui n'allaient plus réintégrer leur cage une fois la porte ouverte.

The Circle Game

[…]

II

Being with you
here, in this room

is like groping through a mirror
whose glass has melted
to the consistency
of gelatin

You refuse to be
(and I)
an exact reflection, yet
will not walk from the glass,
be separate. […]

I stood, staring at the seven letters [freedom], while a lump the size of a fist formed in my throat. Half a dozen communist regimes had fallen in succession, yet Romania remained unaffected. Why?
Had the world forgotten us? Or had Ceausescu ingeniously built a fence of national communism that was impenetrable from the outside as well as the inside?

You think you know someone. And when you realize you're wrong, the humiliation steals something from you. Your mind becomes a thick forest of dark thoughts and you wonder— what else am I not seeing? But I couldn't figure it out. Who was I angrier with? [My best friend] or myself?

When Ceasescu assumed power in the sixties, things were fairly moderate; conditions actually improved for several years.

What changed?

[…] the need to pay the country's debts, but something else. […] Building a cult of personality. […] Listen, Ceausescu may be near illiterate, but […] he's a statesman and a mastermind. He's slowly made people believe that he's a god and we must follow him, blindly.

But the characters in movies […] didn't have to stand in line for food. If they turned on a faucet, hot water rolled out. If they didn't like something, they complained out loud. […]

But crazier-the interactions. They looked at one another for extended periods without diverting their eyes. There was an ease between them. Unspoken comfort.

They weren't worried they might be standing next to an informer. Like me.