Arianna Bustos’s Reviews > The Gloomy Girl Variety Show: A Memoir > Status Update

“He will never truly know what it’s like to grieve collectively and yet still feel devastating loneliness.”

“Do not deny my wounds. Do not tolerate them. Do not make isolated institutionalized space for them. Do not offer me bandages of wounds. A flesh-eating wound. I am festering. Etched into the background of history, bleeding. My sores are unbearable, but at their worst they make you uncomfortable because they’re different from your own.”

CONT.

“All that’s left are the fragile open frissures of chronic suffering.”

MARKED MANIFESTO

“There is nothing more revolutionary than to see and love the sick. To feel the wound and be aware of its existence and what feeds it. To love others as strongly as your infection rages. No longer repressed, one is open to love, to the giving process that is encounter. There is no longer the mask of productivity, of functionality.”

“To leave my room was to enter the battlefield, where a sniper could strike at any second.”

“Through my blackness and through my illness, I learn the importance of safety, grow to value it more than ever before. When I feel safe, I am most distant from my existential fears of being Black and alive in America while I try to find my place in it.”

“Was I like every other Black American that claimed a desire to go to ‘the motherland’”


oh…….