Books

"Have you ever had your heart broken? It’s something that instills a great sense of dread, and it colours everything that happens afterwards in an endless, linear, slow motion. And I hate linearity. It bores everyone."

The first time she told her mother to fuck off, her mother was sitting on the dirty blue velvet couch, reading the newspaper. Polly walked into the living room, excited. Her mother didn’t look up. There was a bottle of beer, open, mostly full, sweating on the table next to her.
“Fuck you!” Polly said, clenching and unclenching her fists.
Her mother looked up, alarmed, but without missing a beat, she whacked Polly across the face with the newspaper.

“Isabelle pulled me backwards, she laid me down across the eiderdown, lifted me, held me in her arms: she was releasing me from a world I had never lived in to launch me into one I could not yet inhabit. With her lips she parted mine, moistened my clenched teeth. The fleshiness of her tongue frightened me: the foreign sex did not enter. I waited, withdrawn, contemplative. The lips wandered over my lips: a dusting of petals. My heart was beating too loudly and I wanted to listen to this seal of sweetness, this soft new tracing. Isabelle is kissing me, I tell myself.”

You never know what spaces might turn into graves. It felt bad— OK , sickening—when I realized I’d partied on her grave, but you just never know if you’re standing on a spot where someone has been or will be beaten to death. It’s cheesy, but sometimes my concerns about the history of violence taint everything, even Shakespeare. That quote “All the world’s a stage” becomes “All the world’s a grave.”
I tossed empty bottles on her grave before it became her grave. I was allowed to escape. I was allowed to walk away from that spot.
Sophia was not. Guilt is a ghost. Guilt interrupts narratives. It does so impolitely. Ghosts have no etiquette. What do they need it for? There is no Emily Post for ghosts.

I got a pedicure each time I promised myself I’d stop doing heroin—which is to say, I got pedicures that whole summer. Pedicures gave me the false notion I was about to get my shit together. I wasn’t functioning well—my brain cells were spent, and my serotonin was depleted. Sitting despondent in a vinyl chair was as good as it got.