Alisha > Recent Status Updates

“What is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. What are they waiting for?”

“It was hard to love a woman that always made you feel so wishful.”

“I am as close to godly as I can be. I am pure. I am lovable. I am exhausted.”

“His impunity thrills me, I mistake it for fearlessness, though years later he will admit to being afraid all the time.”

“What you risk reveals what you value.”

“Survive, whatever it takes.”

“There’s an air of doom about her. She seems profoundly lonely. It’s part of my attraction to her. She reminds me of the church bells of my childhood. In Geneva, all the church bells ring at the same time, every hour on the hour, in every corner of the city, and it’s the most melancholic sound I’ve ever heard, but also beautiful. I think that’s why the suicide rate is so high in Switzerland.”

“So this is how couples do. Marooned on carpet islands, submerged in the other’s deep curiosities. I thought: Maybe his unspoken grief is a complementary chord to my tight-lipped shame. We both had internal lives better left unvoiced.”

“The memory of sustenance is a terrible thing. Far worse, I think, than actual starving. Starving just kills you. Longing can gnaw away at you forever.”

“It occurred to me later the sole surviving remnant of the past belonged to me, the ghost of my father breaking through a ribbon in an old tin frame.”

“The word family never fails to make me feel like I’ve been punched. Conjures an iron gate, tall hedges around a house with lit up windows, me so embarrassingly obviously outside looking in. Pretending I have people to see, somewhere to go.”

“My mother was a witch in the kitchen and a Demeter in the garden.”

“Maybe I’m idealizing my memories. Maybe they’re fictions I want to believe.”

“They’ll twist your nose until it smells death in a bed of roses.”

“Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion.”

“What you don’t understand you can make mean anything.”

“If the sun didn’t come out for two years, would you really still wait for it? Or would you finally realize you needed to find it elsewhere?”

“It became clear to me then, at seven years old: other people lived in orbs of warmth that I was quietly exempt from.”

“Her face would now be, forever, more mysterious and impenetrable than the face of any stranger. Strangers’ faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.”

“Everything her mother did was what she thought was best, as all mothers do—invisible service in the shadows of the things for which they themselves had longed.”

“I’d sit at the top of the scaffolding on St. John and the Divine and look at the lights in people’s apartments go on and off to a rhythm that the people themselves weren’t even aware of. They were all simple cells in this big, beautiful organism, and they had no idea. The city had loved me and always been kind to me even when the individual pieces had not.”

“I ask you: is dullness a gift? intelligence a curse?”

“Didn’t we have anything to talk about? There must have been something. But as I tried to think of what to say, my mind went blank. You’d think we’d be close, but it was precisely because we were close that we couldn’t reach each other. Forcing myself to make conversation felt like standing on a cliff, peering over the edge, about to tumble down headfirst.”

“All children keep secrets. All parents do the same. We mold the version we want others to believe, boosting the disguise and tucking away the truth. It is how we can be loved by our closest family members and still, at times, elude them.”