Barb > Recent Status Updates

All the things around him, the bed linens and hot water and light switches and radiators, are part of an elaborately constructed, pleasantly convincing, utterly inane illusion of safety, of consequence.

It was a simple thing, in the end, to begin.
Marian Graves

After Caleb leaves, Marian is lonely for the first time since coming to Alaska. The uninhabited ring of space she's cultivated around herself begins to seem less like a protective barrier than scorched earth.

The responsibility of owning so many fine and delicate positions, so Mary sparkling bits and bobs that served no real purpose but must not be forgotten or lost or broken, worked on her like a kind of drag, slowing her. She was unused to shoes that must not be gotten wet and gossamer fabrics that snagged or stretched unless she remembered to move cautiously at all times.

She sighed and patted his forearm. "You've had to take care of each other more than most children and grow up quickly. It must have been very hard sometimes.
When he was safely in the attic, he sat on the floor and wept. He had not known how badly he had wanted someone to say exactly that.

In her experience, proximity to other humans did not actually diminish solitude.

Ernest: "that's called nostalgia"
Lisavet: "it's called misremembering. It's not the truth." I don't want to just remember things. I want to know what really happened. I want to know what it was like to actually be there. And the only way to do that is to see everything. Everybody's version of reality.

That's the problem though isn't it? People don't remember things the same way. Is it even possible for us to remember something as it truly happened? A memory, once it's over, is never exactly what it was when it was happening. Whatever comes later changes the meaning of it.

Time can wash dirt off of a memory until it is revealed as something g else entirely.

Ryan clicks his tongue. "Yikes, science. Can't help you there". Like he has ever helped with her homework. How can he say and so such normal things when he's said and done such awful ones?

Much of marriage is some permutation of mismatched desires, like a three-legged race. And desires become indistinguishable. But if perfect understanding of our motives were a prerequisite to action, the world would be motionless.

It follows that an order of nuns who named their school the Immaculate Conception Convent should be violently opposed to sex outside marriage, and quite possibly within it. Sister Ignatius has demonized it enough over the years that we are predestined with to develop life-long sexual hang-ups, or--as in the case of my sister--set upon a trail of wild promiscuity the moment we are set free.

I'm listless and pacing, churned up with feelings I won't t allow to become thoughts. It's the boy mostly. The grip of his hand. I'd forgotten how young children, much like animals, can sense your pain without being afraid of it.

It's strange, the patchwork stories we tell someone when we want them to catch up, a shortcut to knowing is, as if such a thing were possible.

Most of her feels numb. Expose the mind repeatedly to the same trauma, again and again and again, and it will learn to protect itself by normalizing the extraordinary.

The world is careless with nice people. Diamond

Ok, admittedly I was successfully bamboozled by Book of the Month into reading this. So far it reads like a YA novel, and I bristle when it starts to feel too much like other stories (Sand/Spice?) ( boy child plucked out of his family to be educated as Alchemist/Wizard?) but I'm sticking with it.

at the last moment, she feels a panic at being so seen, a dread at centering herself. It's not that she doesn't think their problems deserve attention--only that her problems don't. They have never discussed anything personal before, have never asked each other for help. And the fear of being the first to apply such a stress test to their bond, is so potent she can't bring herself to do it.

The rest of it--the politics, the mental illness that drowned my mother, the cruel twists and turns--well, there is a fetid underside to like sometimes.

I didn't want to tell you all that had happened. It made me ashamed and it made me confused. I wanted my mother to be normal, to be like other mothers. She had the rage, she had the depression, she was violent, she was cruel, she refused to let me live in peace.

...she had bitten the tops off several eggplants because she said the greengrocer had treated her like a lowly peasant...I had melted in shame...she cornered the beet seller and his daughter, told him he should never take his eye off his daughter because she could easily become a whore...When she was overtaken by these manic forces, my mother's cruel streak whipped out of her like a snake, unable to be contained.

Her rage episodes left my father and me bereft. They barreled through like a force of nature, like a hurricane out of control, and once whatever semblance of peace we had in our home had been destroyed, we were left exhausted and brittle.

Explained it to me like this: if you got too much sun and not enough rain, crops will wither. If you got too much two , they rot in the ground. You need a balance of spirit. A body, he told me, is the same way.

Addicts are among the most sensitive, creative, kind and spiritual people who often become addicts because they can't help feeling everything, and that hurts like hell.

Her terms were always some extremely convincing version of, "I got this." And instead of asking for direction from a higher power, she just kept asking herself.

It was surrendering his will to a higher power that saved his life, restored him to sanity, and gave meaning to his soul.

Others experience god as the act of waiting in humble faith through difficult moments, rather than acting on impulse.

The essential thing is only that they give themselves over to some sort of intelligence that is bigger than their own, laying down their inflated ego by admitting that their life has become unmanageable and that they definitely need new management around here.

...once the limit is crossed, the only way to bear the unbearable is to laugh at it.

We can only feel sorry for ourselves when our misfortunes are still supportable.