Emily > Recent Status Updates

“…how many times over all these decades have I wondered if my career was over, starting with the ‘the end of the world’ when I wasn’t accepted into the American Ballet Theatre? Lucia Chase made it dismissively clear that she didn’t need me, but, as I discovered, I didn’t need Lucia Chase. The end of the world turned out to the the beginning.

“From childhood on, not having children was as unapologetic as my ethnicity and I was just as unapologetic about it as an adult, which put me on the receiving end of such mystifying reactions as ‘you don’t really know what it’s like to be a woman until you have children’ and ‘are you a lesbian?’ Well, yes I do, and no, I’m not, so take it or leave it.

“You have earned your place in the afterlife…any god worth worshipping would grant it to you. And if there’s an afterlife that would deny you entry, I do not want to be there, either.”

We had time. For so much of my life, time had been a curse-something to be endured rather than cherished. Now? Now I reveled in it. We have time. The most wonderful statement. A fucking gift.

“You learned Therini.”
“Always, you listen to words that are not belonging of you. I want…to give you, to speak of you, in your words, your voice.”
His Thereni was terrible, the accent so thick it was difficult to understand. Yet, the sound of my mother tongue rendered in his voice felt like the collision of two songs sung deep in my soul, now intertwined in perfect harmony. It sounded like home.

“Humans will follow a sweet lie to the ends of the earth. They will die for it, and they will kill for it.”

“That my half breed child’s life was worth so little when weighted against that of their nations.”

Some of these nations were at the mercy of others for centuries, since its smaller militares or weaker economies. But now? The power balance changed very quickly. Many have lost their homes. And that leaves them with only two hopes. One is to find a new home, one where they’re conquerors cannot touch them. And the others to make themselves more powerful than their assailants, and take them over once again.