Alena > Recent Status Updates

Most of our lives, we run between space and time, between beginnings and endings, trying to figure out where: where in the story are we now, what is the beginning and where is the end. But maybe there are no beginnings, and no endings, either. Maybe all there is, is the middle, bending, sinuous, constantly flowing back into itself.

What do you even mean, Ma?
Just that imagination looks forward and memory backward, and where the two meet, that's fiction.
That's absurd.
Why?
Because if something looks forward and another thing looks backward, they don't ever see each other.

Something happens to our brains when faced with myth, like with some forms of poetry: we switch on to decoding, rather than to simple, passive understanding.

We crawled through time, like roaches through the linings of walls.

I would lie next to her, knowing that she knew somewhere in her little body that I, too, was fragile and scared, and maybe that was the reason why she felt so scared. ... the sensation that my life, which had always held together, was never going to feel quite certain again, quite as solid, because at any moment it could all spill out of their hands ...

Like all good bartenders, Darius has mastered the two most important aspects of his job: pretending he was listening when he was not listening, and pretending he was not listening when he was.

Sometimes realty comes crashing down on you. Other times reality simply waits, patiently, for you to run out of the energy it takes to deny it.

The world doesn't give you things, you take things. If you learn one thing from me, it should probably be that.

He had never understood how the Christian could hate the Jew, or the Jew the Muslim, or whatever combination. It was all a scam; they competed over who had pulled off the better con. Bragging rights for that honor had its place of course; the body count over the century seemed excessive, however.

All that lost lore. The secret history of 1001 rip offs, full moon robberies, and blacktop hijackings. Extortion plays, botched heists, and longshot scores. ... Now that Carney was retired he saw how crazy those days had been. Like a former rummy remembering the legendary benders of yore with incredulity. And shame. And weird pride.

... look closely into that manual,
into the book of
tools no longer

used, into the book of
what we don't yet see
under this applause of
starlight for the always

finishing play unfurling
right before our very
eyes. Are they open or

shut. ... (Dusk in Drought)

The city was in the breaking business, with a sideline in reinvention, new starts; this latter process got most of the press.

What would a good man do in this situation? He wasn't sure he'd ever met one, and if he had, he had not been paying attention.

[Protest of any scale matters.] Every derailment of normalcy matters when what's becoming normal is a genocide.

Up in the lobby, they had both kinds of white people - the ones who flinch when they see you and the ones who look right through you.

There had always been those who lived at the edge of things, in recesses of parks, on the hard floors of vacant buildings. Their numbers had multiplied when Carney wasn't looking. They came here, casualties of prosperity above.

He'd always blamed other people for dragging him into their messes, but all bullshit aside he chose the chaos himself. Deep down, he loved the chaos as much as the next crooked soul.

There's no such thing as someone else's children.

Why did she not know what she wanted anymore? Every decision felt at once meaningless and overwhelming.

Tomorrow more Palestinians will die, but the unsaid thing is that it's all right, because that's what those people do.

On the Last Day
...
Even as it
erases itself it does not
erase the thing

it was. And gave you.

No one can tell the whole story.

Whose nonexistence is necessary for the self acceptance of this place?

And don't think my pain wasn't real, or as bad as yours. It is the condition of the heartbroken to believe no one has felt as they have, ever in the history of the world. It's an affront to feel otherwise.

As with the cats, when it came to Erica, there was a divide between her soul and her logic, and she refused to look at it squarely. Laure was in the grip of something she did not understand, and as with all things she did not understand she preferred to believe it below her notice.

The sea keeps flinging it's wet chaos at me.

Here in the brine, I am keenly aware of the planet that I am on as a planet ... Gravity that applies even in the fucking sea, where I'm getting so tired of trying to stay buoyant. ... The only person who can defend me against the sea is me.

If people cannot be flawed in fiction, there is no place left for us to be human

Nostalgia is powerful. It is natural.… We long for the past, particularly when we can remember our histories as better than they were.

There's a lot of bureaucracy. I prefer common sense.

In theory, these mementos served to bring back the moment. In fact, they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.