Alisha > Recent Status Updates

“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.”

“Love without fear, sex without risk, that’s what they wanted to be true; and they almost did it, I thought, they almost pulled it off, but as in magicians’ tricks or burglaries half-success is failure and we’re back to other things.”

“Life is strange, isn’t it? You can be totally entranced by the glow of something one minute, be willing to sacrifice everything to make it yours, but then a little time passes, or your perspective changes a bit, and all of a sudden you’re shocked at how faded it appears. What was I looking at? you wonder.”

“Life is strange, isn’t it? You can be totally entranced by the glow of something one minute, be willing to sacrifice everything to make it yours, but then a little time passes, or your perspective changed a bit, and all of a sudden you’re shocked at how faded it appears. What was I looking at? you wonder.”

I envied and feared my mother’s ability to keep matters private, as every secret I tried to hold close ate away at me. She possessed a rare talent for keeping secrets, even from us. She did not need anyone. She could surprise you with how little she needed you. All those years she instructed me to save 10 percent of myself like she did, I never knew it meant she had also been keeping a part of herself from me too.

On autoimmune disease: “She resented her body’s betrayal. She still couldn’t express how insecure it made her, how she lived on a precipice. The most basic parts of her could fail, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.”

“When we tore down what confined us, what did we have in mind to replace it? I offer no defence of coercive heterosexual monogamy, except that it was at least a way of doing things, a way of seeing life through. What do we have now? Instead? Nothing. And we hate people for making mistakes so much more than we love them for doing good that the easiest way to live is to do nothing, say nothing, and love no one.”

“Hartjes had wanted to say that if it was easy to get over your mother discarding you, then the whole world would be a different stranger place. That hurt had a weight to it, a gravity as essential as the Earth’s, and it was a kind of natural law that kept them all doing as they should.”

“For weeks now she has had this feeling, the feeling of moving around inside a protective film, floating like mercury. The outside world touches against her outside skin, but not the other part of her, inside.”

“You love being the rebel night owl. I bet you’re up all night chain-smoking and reading Bukowski.”