Amanda > Recent Status Updates

Oh yeah bring on the body horror!

" I remembered how much like a bicycle she felt in bed."

Hoot! Laughing out loud.

Shame unfurled in his chest

And again!

Fear bloomed in her chest

A sub-wrenched free of her chest

Awareness uncurled in her chest

That's three chest metaphors in two pages. 😆

When he pulled away, her eyes were open, her gaze liquid and intense. A new understanding cracked open in his chest. They both knew that was not practice. That was real.

We invest so much in certain objects, don't we? More vessels, dipped into the waters of life, holding identity inside. Which I guess just goes to show how little of what we think of as identity is really real.

The last time I was this disturbed by a particular type of scene was in the book Unwind (Neil Shusterman).

HOLY COW

"The state will decide that, not you. Do you understand? The state will not give one cartwheeling f*** about you. When it decides to prosecute you, all the innocence in the world won't help you. At that point you are a piece of dumb meat in the jurisprudence system and the jurisprudence system, Sean, will take away your life."

[You] start to recognize... that since your faults and deficiencies are well nigh infinite, you'd best figure out your good points and learn to get by with what you have. But this wretched sort of feeling I had as I stood in front of the mirror at 16, listing all my physical shortcomings, is still a sort of touchstone for me even now. The sad spreadsheet of my life that reveals how much my debts far outweigh my asset

16 is an intensely troublesome age. You worry about little things, can't pinpoint where you are in any objective way, become really proficient and strange, pointless skills, and are held enthralled by inexplicable complexes. As you get older, though, through trial and error you learn to get what you need, and throw out what should be discarded.

You have to wait until tomorrow to find out what tomorrow will bring.

Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you're going to while away the years, it's far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive than in a fog, and I believe running helps you do that.

We have to be careful. There are no secrets anymore. Vampires can't come into your house unless you invite them. Posting online is like leaving your front door open and telling any creature of the night it can enter.

And I pictured my parents: how they looked at me now that my hair was long, how they looked at each other a lot when they were talking to me. How obvious it seemed to me that somewhere along the line, our paths had forked, and now we were on different tracks looking at each other across a distance that would soon be infinite.

Ever smelling its air, feeling its wind on my face. There must be others like me who struggle more than I do. It makes me sad to think of them.

The pity strangers visibly felt for me, the unmistakable physical flinches they gave off on seeing me, were like map markers suggesting some present horror. But in my own eyes I was normal. Here and there, alone, reflecting, I'd bump up against what felt like a buffer zone between me and some vast reserve of grief, but it's reinforcements were sturdy enough and its construction solid enough to prevent me from really

'Hard to predict' was another thing I'd brought home from the hospital, a phrase that had become a secret personal talisman, something I didn't dwell on but kept nearby. I had headaches and a pulsating ring that throbbed in my ears. I was still too weak to Bear much weight. But I'd had an idle little dream and a small dead space, and the dream was now alive and hungry inside me.

For reasons that seem obvious to me, I don't believe in Happy endings or even in endings at all, but I am as susceptible to moments of indulgent fantasy as anybody else.

For a long time I hoped you'd forgive me. And look! Tons of that has happened! Not all at the same time, but the kind of hope I have isn't just greed going by it's maiden name. The kind of hope I have doesn't begin and end with demanding everything go back to the way it was when it can't, it can't ever, that's not how time works, and it's not how oceans work, either. Nothing you love comes back.

But it is my experience that you learn everything in this world out of order. You only know what you needed to know after it's already done getting ruined all over you.

She listens, and I wish I could give her a little gold trophy for it, but I can't, because of all the things fuckwits gave trophies for, they never thought listening like nothing exists but time and words was half as important as losing a volleyball tournament.

Just be trash together and love as long as you can and then stop when you can't anymore and be trash separately.

But you can't ever imagine what you're going to care about when you turn into the version of you that's waiting on the other side of five years from now. That's a stranger waiting to ambush you, and all you can do is plant your feet and try not to get thrown.

They each did not believe the other's version of the world. It wasn't something that can be resolved with talk.

And for this, he thought, we left Tekel Upharsin. There's a macabre irony about it; we all came here because we wanted to live more fully. We wanted to be useful. Everyone in this colony had a dream. Maybe that's what was wrong with us, he thought. We have been Lodged too deeply on our respective dream worlds. We don't seem able to come out of them; that's why we can't function as a group.

"Nobody's going to be armed," Belsner said
"We're in a bad enough situation already. If you're armed, you'll kill one another either accidentally or intentionally." He did not know why he felt this, but intuitively he knew himself to be correct.