chirysalis’s Reviews > Weather > Status Update

"My mother told me once that each thing, each being, has two names. One is the name by which it is known in this world and the other is a secret name that it keeps hidden. But if you call it by this name it cannot help but respond. This is the name by which the creature was known in the Garden of Eden."

"We order grilled cheese sandwiches and eavesdrop on the people at the next table. "Is he your soul mate?" the woman asks her friend.
"Hard to tell," she says."

""Some things are in the air, they float around," she says, and I think of leaves, of something falling and accumulating without notice."

"I need to pack for this trip, but there's something buzzing around the room. I can't see it, but I can hear it hurling itself against the glass. A bee maybe, or a wasp. Over there, on the blinds, I think. I capture it with the aid of a cup and an index card.

Quiet in the cup. Hard to believe that isn't joy, the way it flies away when I fling it out the window."

---

way to be cynical

"A few days later, I yelled at him for losing his new lunch box, and he turned to me and said, Are you sure you're my mother? Sometimes you don't seem like a good enough person.

He was just a kid, so I let it go. And now, years later, I probably only think of it, I don't know, once or twice a day."

"What it means to be a good person, a moral person, is calculated differently in times of crisis than in ordinary circumstances, [...] Suppose you go with some friends to the park to have a picnic. This act is, of course, morally neutral, but if you witness a group of children drowning in the lake and you continue to eat and chat, you have become monstrous."

"One good thing about being addicted to sleeping pills is that they don't call it "addicted"; they call it "habituated.""

"It's slow today so I help her set up for class.
Cushions for the strong, chairs for the weak. "You should stay," she always tells me, but I never do.
Not sure where to sit."

"You seem to identify down, not up. Why do you think that is?"

You tell me, lady.

---

🙄

"In the first class I ever took with Sylvia, she told us about assortative mating. Meaning like with like-depressive with depressive. The problem with assortative mating, she said, is that it feels perfectly correct when you do it. Like a key fitting into a lock and opening a door. The question being: Is this really the room you want to spend your life in?"