Madi > Recent Status Updates

The little girl I spend twenty-one hours a week with is definitely starting to get it. Every day I watch her grip tighter and tighter onto the feeling of being ignored by the person she loves the most. And she’s this awesome, serious child who loves information and answers, and how could her own mother not appreciate the shit out of this?

Apparently converting my feelings into words is a pathway my neurons are unfamiliar with.

That one simple statement made me feel a lifetime closer to him. Sometimes, Declan simply being who he was felt like a character attack on everyone else. He just existed and in comparison, everyone paled.

Two weeks ago I got the call. If you've ever gotten "the call" in your life, you'll unfortunately know what I mean. The one that creates a before and after in your story, bookending each side. Whatever you had been doing prior to it becomes so hilariously insignificant in comparison to the words coming through the phone speaker.

The white shotgun house appeared, looking the same as she’d remembered, which seemed wrong since her grandmother would not be sitting on the porch to greet them. Her death hit in waves. Not a flood, but water lapping steadily at her ankles.

You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.

Kennedy had insisted she couldn’t take time away from work and auditions to visit home, but really, she just wanted her mother to see her New York life. She took a perverse delight in it, like she was a child dragging her over to see the drawing she’d scribbled on the wall. Look at the mess I’ve made!

“But I could never tell my mother any of this,” she said. “She’d just say that she was right. She cares more about being right than being my mother. Sometimes I don’t even think she likes me very much. Isn’t that something? To think your own mother can’t even stand you.”

“I don’t know why you’re fighting it neither. What could be better than being eighteen and in love? Oh, you don’t even know. If I could go back, I’d do everything different.”
“Like what?” she said.
“Oh, everything.” He turned back to the mirror. “This big ol’ world and we only get to go through it once. The saddest thing there is, you ask me.”

This was his gift, a short memory. A long memory could drive a man crazy.

The idea hadn’t been Stella’s at all—during that final summer, it was Desiree who’d decided to run away after the picnic. Which should not have been surprising, perhaps. Hadn’t she, for years, told anyone who would listen that she couldn’t wait to leave Mallard? Mostly she’d told Stella, who indulged her with the patience of a girl long used to hearing delusions.

I was to guard Duke not in my uniform but as a plainclothes officer. It would appear to any outside observer that a black man was hanging out with the Klan. Again, I raised objectives to the chief at the ridiculousness of this order, but I loaded my gun with five bullets to kill five assholes if need be and set out for the day.

The fact that he [David Duke] won an election as a Republican after failing twice as a Democratic candidate says a lot about the mind-set of the electorate. The conservative right-wing Republican political agenda was then and still is much more in sync with white, hate-fueled racist extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

Everything that follows was accomplished despite, and in spite of, the supremacists’ claim in some cases to being highly educated, having more intelligence, and being far superior in every way to blacks and Jews, and anyone else they deemed inferior.

If one black man, aided by a bevy of good, decent, dedicated, open-, and liberal-minded whites and Jews can succeed in prevailing over a group of white racists by making them look like the ignorant fools they truly are, then imagine what a nation of like-minded individuals can accomplish.

Everyone gets an ending. Whether or not it’s happy is up to them.

hE looked around at hiS white walls, not seeing that hE alone held a string. hE would never reach up and feel the thread on hiS eyes. hE would never feel the zipper on hiS mouth.
“You are free now,” the voice said.
But hE could not hear it. hE could only sit in hiS solitary confinement. Watching the town. Looking for the next child.

Maybe it's all the same. Korgy and pants and YouTube and makeup and sweaters and junk food and sex. Maybe they're all just distractions from me. But right now, me feels okay. No chaos, no turmoil, no endless list of wants. Right now, I don't want for anything.

I want to scream. Or cry. But instead I just stare at her as an immaculate wave washes over me. A wave of recognition. Of peace. Of freedom. The peace and freedom that can only come from lowering your expectations of someone. From letting go of that person you wanted them to be, needed them to be, and in the letting go of that version, letting go, too, of all the resentments that came from them not being that version

It's funny, I thought our friendship would end dramatically, the insults we'd been saving up for years shot back and forth, lears and snot streaking our faces. But instead, the ending has been uneventful, petering out with almost no noise at all. Maybe that's how you know it's really an ending.

People who come from functioning families just don't have the same charge as the rest of us. Functioning families make for boring, favorless people who just go through the motions of life, never knowing what it really means to live it.

“A nightmare is nothing but a dream gone sick,” Christopher said out loud.

He remembered when he used to leave out cookies for Santa Claus. Christopher’s mother made delicious peanut butter blossoms with a Hershey’s Kiss right in the middle of each one.

Christopher went back to his bedroom and waited for morning to come. He would have read his books to pass the time, but the truth was that he had memorized all of them already. He saw them all like flash cards in his mind. Pages turning like generations from birth to death. Beginning to end. Trees to paper.

He just had to keep Christopher alive. He felt like the whole world depended on it.

I can’t tell…
I can’t tell…you what is happening, Mom.


It would…
It would…terrify you.

Carl went on to spew his trademark technical jargon. The sheriff always wondered why geniuses couldn’t talk like normal people. But maybe that’s what made them geniuses.

just remember…
we can swallow our fear or let our fear swallow us

It was never said that Christopher was in charge. But nobody questioned him. Not even Mike, and he was the strongest.
Somehow, children always know who the leader is.

Some people’s fake is more honest than other people’s real.

from the acknowledgements:

"And finally…
Emma Watson, who inspired the ending on the Perks of Being a Wallflower set
and Stephen King, who inspired everything else."