manasvi’s Reviews > The Virgin Suicides > Status Update

It occurred to us that she and the girls read secret signs of misery in cloud formations, that despite the discrepancy in their ages something timeless communicated itself between them, as though she were advising the girls in her mumbling Greek, “Don’t waste your time on life.”

and the love he felt at that moment, truer than all subsequent loves because it never had to survive real life, still plagued him, even now in the desert, with his looks and health wasted. “You never know what’ll set the memory off,” he told us. “A baby’s face. A bell on a cat’s collar. Anything.”

We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all.

“What are you doing here, honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.” And it was then Cecilia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: “Obviously, Doctor,” she said, “you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”