Button’s Reviews > Private Citizens > Status Update

You think every functioning couple knows themselves and expresses what they want and hears what the other is saying perfectly? That we're not pumping everyone else full of prejudices and fantasies with no connection to reality? The only thing holding relationships together is intention. It's not a matter of fact or reason. We get to say what happened because we're the only ones who care.

shyness wobbling her voice at the rare moment of wanting to get a compliment right.

You think I'm oblivious to what you want, but you still want me to intuit your feelings, even though you deliberately mislead me about them, possibly to test my intuition, which you use to gauge the depth of my understanding and caring for you.

What I really fear is being an echoist. A helpless nymph who loses her voice for loving it too much, loses her body for loving a narcissist. Nothing but a dumb attention-hungry repetition of other people's words. The cliche made flesh, then robbed of it. Wherever will collapses under fate it makes an echo.

to the charge of narcicissm? Nolo contendere. All love is projection. stuffing your experiences and hopes into whatever object petit a, then embracing it. And don't forget, dude, we've discussed how self-loathing is narcissistic too; dwelling over your shortcomings, insisting on your own worthlessness over everyone else's objections. Hating is, after all, caring.

I want impossible self-authorship: to be sui generis, valuable in myself and flawed by my own hand. I'll become the archangel of wry suffering, producing only ephemera, marginalia, juvenilia--a print so fine it doesn't exist. Being unwritten, unread, hiding out in an apartment, in subtext, unnatural, unnurtured, refusing to be emplotted like a good little subject, that's my whole deal now.

'More than anything I refuse to make my past mean anything, to have the imposed cliche of mistreatment-by-shitty-dudes matter in any way.'

Oh Linda I love you. Despite a truckton of your shit.

I always knew narrative was oppressive--narrowing things down to one or even a thousand perspectives is still an abridgment of infinity.

'I didn't say no, because I assumed he'd probably say no to my no and there was definitely no saying no to that. Consent made everything less complicated.'

fresh damn hell

She waved him off as if he were an odor.