ALEC S > Recent Status Updates

“Cowboys and Indians disappear, dying off or transforming themselves by tortuous degrees into something quite different. The originals are nearly gone and will soon be lost forever in the overwhelming crowd. Legendary enemies, their ghosts ride away together - buddies at last - into the mythic sunset of the West.”

“It seems to me possible, even probable, that many of the nonhuman undomesticated animals experience emotions unknown to us. What do the coyotes mean when they yodel at the moon? What are the dolphins trying so patiently to tell us?”

“The kiss lasted three seconds, maybe four, but it set everything else in motion. My life was a painting I’d been staring at upside down until that moment, that moment when Leila wandered in and flipped it right-side up for me. Just like that. Everything clicked into place, the picture came into clarity.”

“I guess, I write these sentences where I try to lineate grief or doubt or joy or sex or whatever till it sounds as urgent as it feels. But I know the words will never feel like the thing. The language will never be the thing. So it’s damned, right?”

“You bit your tongue, then bit it a little harder. You tried to keep your face still enough to tell yourself you hadn’t been complicit, that at least you weren’t encouraging what was happening around you. To you.”

“Well, we fly through our days. We move from one decision to the next, only we’re not even aware they’re decisions. We treat our minds like crowns, these magnificent crowns on our magnificent autonomies. But our minds aren’t crowns. They’re clocks. It’s why we invest everything In our stories.”

“Please, write your book so that no one will ever be able to desecrate my brother’s memory again.”

“Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded.”

“Bearing that in mind, the question which remains to us is this: what is humanity? What do we have to do to keep humanity as one thing and not another?”

“The scent of acacia seeped in through the closed window, my nostrils twitched automatically.
Burning my tongue on a steamed potato my sister gave me, blowing on it hastily and juggling it in my mouth.
Flesh of a watermelon grainy as sugar, the glistening black seeds I didn’t bother to pick out.”

“Our bodies are piled on top of each other in the shape of a cross. The body of a man I don’t know has been thrown across my stomach at a ninety-degree angle, face up, and on top of him a boy, older than me, tall enough that the crook of his knees presses down onto my bare feet. The boy’s hair brushed my face. I was able to see all of that because I was still stuck fast to my body, then.”

“How long do souls linger by the side of their bodies?
“Do they really flutter away like some kind of bird? Is that what trembles the edges of the candle flame?”

“What you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself.”

“If the distance is unbearable, she didn’t ask, then or in the two days she stayed with her parents, then why do you live so far from me?”

“He say slaves from Africy had wings, but white folk cut them off so they couldn’t fly home. When I was little , he say my mama fly away like that. Took me a while to know he mean she run off.”

“But what about when you lose someone who is still alive? When you lose track of the person you know within a person they’ve become - what kind of grief is that?”

“It’s a danger to accept anything real from another person, to know something of them. A person has to be careful about the voices they listen to, the faces they let themselves see.”

“That’s what people do. We can’t live each other’s lives, and we can’t see each other’s memories or feelings, so we try to find ways to share them with each other.”

“They take me every week. My whole family was killed in the name of God and now these people want me to sing a hymn like it was all some kind of misunderstanding.”

“I felt this gentle urgency around her, a bruised kindness, as if something had been threatening to destroy her every day of her life and her only defense, somehow, was to remain so torn open.”

“She did not hear him cross the courtyard beyond, nor see him pause in the arch-way that led from the subterranean path into the garden. He stood a minute, looking at her with new eyes, seeing what no one had ever seen before”