Carolina Quotes“Ain’t my business,” I said. Like always, I was waiting to see how it was. “That’s right, John, it ain’t your business,” the devil said. “Nothing I do is any of your business, John, but everything you do is mine.”
The 2000s
120 quotations.
Max, you are a melodrama with no audience and a cast of one!
She didn’t look around as I slammed the front door and locked it, just like I promised I’d do—cept I was outside the door, on the porch, when I done it.
I knew this way well. It was the track to the praying ground, where are the colored folks on that part of St. Helena met to have their Christian worship, far from white men and their devilments. What there is bout a colored church service that so riles up the white trash, I didn’t know then and I don’t know now, cept maybe they hate to see us going straight to the true Master, you know, and skipping the middleman.
Mr. Davis was a Senator, you know, before he became a professional Southerner, and a Senator can out-talk any man—can make you think a horse-chestnut is a chestnut horse.
People will say bout anything. That don’t mean I have to believe it. What I see with my own eyes, that I believe.
Stephen knew I first served the Church by stocking reliquaries—transmuting unused bits of rotting paupers into the toes and teeth of saints.
Oh, those sanctified fields and vineyards, always heard of but never seen! Surely there, we thought, the starving could pluck and eat in peace, free of the pious prattle that we choked down with our meals in Rome. In this we were correct. As I rose higher in the church, the meals grew more substantial and the piety less burdensome. I saw the lame and the dying leaping like frogs around a finger bone that had been fondling a milkmaid not two weeks before.
I asked Formosus how his trial was proceeding thus far. Less and less of God, and more and more of man It is of God, as well, I replied. It is mad and pointless, and inefficient. It is godlike.
“I don’t allow officers to mince words with me, Colonel. You must speak freely and frankly.” “General, they are ignoramuses.” “I believe the phrase you were groping for, Colonel, is goddamn worthless ignoramuses, but you’re definitely on the right track.
I went, shouted louder and louder, tried to clear my mind so that, when necessary, I could act without thinking, act like a soldier.
In everyone’s life there are crossroads, moments of decision, however insignificant. To spot the crucial moments in his life, and act, makes a great soldier. To spot the crucial moments on a larger scale, a grand scale—that’s the work of a general.
It’s an insane idea, yes, but hell, this is war. If insanity works, a general is duty-bound to use it.
Money talk tends to be confusing. When people talk money, they usually think “wealth”, “costs”, “profit”, “income”, “gold”, “greed”, “time” (as in “time is money”), or something like that. In everyday discourse money symbolises capitalism, for better or worse: money as the life or evil force of the economy. As Liza Minnelli sings to us in the classical musical Cabaret: “Money makes the world go round… ”. The tune resonates when people exclaim “money” in response to the question what they are after in life, or when they say that everything people do ultimately revolves around money. All this talk is clear enough. The confusion enters when we observe the very same people who are so enthused about money, stubbornly suppress any reference to money when it comes to goods like the love for their partner, parents and children, friendship, science (truth!) and art (beauty!).
God's angels often protect his servants from potential enemies.
I work in waves because I'm impatient. It has to be done. I take liberties.
When I work I work very fast, but preparing the work can take any length.
Probably even more than the architecture I'd be drawn to landscape. That's my first love, landscape.. .All kinds of landscape, if it's not cluttered up and vandalised. Yesterday we went out to Blenheim, and I love the flatness and the trees. I like all kinds. And where I'm from, the central valley of Virginia, is not one of the most exciting landscapes in the world, but it's one of the most beautiful. It's very beautiful because it has everything. It has mountains, there are streams, there are fields, beautiful trees. And architecture sits very well in it.. .And I've always lived in the south of Italy, because it’s more excitable. It's volcanic. The land affects people naturally, that's part of the characteristics, for me, of a people, in a sense.
I knew a poet who was totally ignorant about botany. And I said: you can't be a poet without knowing any botany or plants and things like that; it's impossible, that's the first thing you should know.
I've found when you get old you must return to certain things in the beginning, or things you have a sentiment for or something. Because your life closes up in so many ways or doesn't become as flexible or exciting or whatever you want to call it. You tend to be nostalgic. And I think about my boats. It's more complicated than that, but also it's going out and also there's a lot of references to crossing over. But the thing of the Nile boat in Winter's Passage: Luxor was about the wonderful thing, the lazy thing, of being two or three months in Luxor by the river. It was just that, it explains a winter passage. From a certain point to the other side: it's like the Greek boat that ferries you over to the other world. That sculpture didn't have it. But sometimes the large painting in Houston does have it. It's a passage through everything.
And I am very happy to have the boat motif because, when I grew up, in summer with my parents we were always in Massachusetts, and I was always by the sea. You know, sometimes little boys love cars, but I had a particular passion for boats, and now I live by the sea. For sure, it is a passage, but it's also very fascinating for lots of things. When you get interested in something you can find out a lot about things. You might meet people who are interested in one subject or another, like they collect palms. I've found people from all over the world who were fanatical about palms, which you wouldn't know unless you were interested in palms. And the sea: because, if you've noticed, the sea is white three quarters of the time, just white – early morning. Only in the fall does it get blue, because the haze is gone. The Mediterranean [where Twombly is living later in his life], at least – the Atlantic is brown – is just always white, white, white. And then, even when the sun comes up, it becomes a lighter white.. .Not because I paint it white; I'd have painted it white even if it wasn't, but I am always happy that I might have. It's something that has other consciousness behind it.
It's a sort of infantile thing, painting. Paint in a sense is a certain infantile thing. I mean in the handling. I start out using a brush but then I can't take the time because the idea doesn't correspond, it gets stuck when the brush goes out of paint in a certain length of time. So I have to go back and by then I might have lost the rest of it. So I take my hand and I do it. Or I have those wonderful things that came in later: paint sticks.. .So I had to find things that I could use, like my hands or the paint sticks.. .And I did those charts, big palettes.. .two or three paintings with palettes and all of the colours – pink, flesh, brown, red for blood. And I think with most painters you can think and it can change very fast, the impetus of what something is. It's instinctive in a certain kind of painting, not as if you were painting an object or special things, but it's like coming through the nervous system. It's like a nervous system. It's not described, it's happening. The feeling is going on with the task.
To me, Pollock is the height of American painting. It's very lyrical. Gorky, who is very passionate, can copy a drawing or take a drawing and copy it exactly as a painting, and Miro can too, it's amazing. Miro can do a drawing to paint and that's another training in a sense. So there's a certain mannerism that comes in both of them [three], and probably everything becomes obvious in time. But I don't have that. The line is illustrated or the colour. I'm sure it has great feeling when they're doing it, but it's more towards defining something. It has a certain clarity because it's a complex thing. I'm a painter and my whole balance is not having to think about things. So all I think about is painting. It's the instinct for the placement where all that happens. I don't have to think about it. So I don't think of composition; I don’t think of colour here and there. Sometimes I alter something after. So all I could think is the rush.. .I cannot make a picture unless everything is working. It's like a state.
It's more like I'm having an experience than making a picture. So I've never had anyone around. I never have. People are different, but I have to really be with no interference. And it takes me hours. Painting a picture is a very short thing if it goes well, but the sitting and thinking.. .I usually go off on stories that have nothing to do with the painting, and sometimes I sit in the opposite room to where I work. If I can get a good hot story I can paint better, but sometimes I'm not thinking about the painting, I'm thinking about the subject. Lots of times I'll sit in another room and then I might just go in. It takes a lot of freedom. I'm working for two years on a subject now: ten paintings, and that can carry on for two years. I worked last summer and I started this summer and with just the simplest motif I just can't seem to do it. And everything slowed down.
Washington, D.C. is a city filled with people who believe they are important.
They were nothing like the French people I had imagined. If anything, they were too kind, too generous and too knowledgeable in the fields of plumbing and electricity.
on genders of nouns: Why refer to Lady Crack Pipe or Good Sir Dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied?
After a few months in my parents' basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of the these things are dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations.
For the first twenty years of my life I rocked myself to sleep. It was a harmless enough hobby, but eventually I had to give it up. Throughout the next twenty-two years I lay still and discovered that after a few minutes I could drop off with no problem. Follow seven beers with a couple of scotches and a thimble of good marijuana, and it's funny how sleep just sort of comes on its own. Often I never even make it to bed. I'd squat down to pet the cat and wake up on the floor eight hours later, having lost a perfectly good excuse to change my clothes. I'm now told that this is not called "going to sleep" but rather "passing out," a phrase that carries a distinct hint of judgment.
Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character.
In other parts of the country people tried to stay together for the sake of the children. In New York they tried to work things out for the sake of the apartment.
If cooking is an art, I think we're in our Dada phase.
Because I'm both a glutton and a masochist, my standard complaint, "That was so bad", is always followed by "And there was so little of it!"
Friends always say, "How can you eat those? I read in the paper that they're made from hog's lips." "And...?" "And hearts and eyelids."
The word phobic has its place when properly used, but lately it's been declawed by the pompous insistence that most animosity is based upon fear rather than loathing. No credit is given for distinguishing between these two very different emotions.
You can't kill the Rooster. You might can fuck him up a little sometimes, but you can't kill him.
I ain't seen pussy in so long I'd throw stones at it.
Why did I tolerate Braswell if he was such a loon? The answer is simple and tragic. I liked him. I knew he was crazy, but he was crazy in an engaging sort of way. Both Frank and Pat have a personal charm which tends to mask their character defects, and this charm has allowed them to pull the wool over many a White patriot's eyes for some time. In this way they have had the operational assistance of a number of enthusiastic proponents, including me. I am as much responsible as anyone else for the Braswells' inflated reputations in the Movement. I covered their flamboyant gunfights in NS publications, neglecting to mention that the assailants were not Israeli commandos or gin mad niggers but the irate relatives of Braswell's first wife and his daughter's jilted boyfriend. Many people, like me, found the image of "feudin', fightin', fussin' Nazi mountain folk" titillating, and so we built up a completely false image for these people as being the Hatfields in brown shirts when in fact they were dangerously unstable nut cases. A lot of people, not the least myself, were to pay dearly for that indulgence.
'Great White Leaders' start out the same way—in first getting a check or so, and then thinking that they have 'a right' to continued support so they no longer have to earn a real living. In effect, these people are more like merchants and tradesmen putting a value on their wares that most other people do not— hence Hoffman's snit about only a half-dozen or so 'paying their fair share'.
Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.
The real intent of my writing is not to say, you must think in this way. The real intent is: here are some of the many important facets of this extraordinary Kosmos; have you thought about including them in your own worldview? My work is an attempt to make room in the Kosmos for all of the dimensions, levels, domains, waves, memes, modes, individuals, cultures, and so on ad infinitum. I have one major rule: Everybody is right. More specifically, everybody—including me—has some important pieces of truth, and all of those pieces need to be honored, cherished, and included in a more gracious, spacious, and compassionate embrace. To Freudians I say, Have you looked at Buddhism? To Buddhists I say, Have you studied Freud? To liberals I say, Have you thought about how important some conservative ideas are? To conservatives I say, Can you perhaps include a more liberal perspective? And so on, and so on, and so on… At no point I have ever said: Freud is wrong, Buddha is wrong, liberals are wrong, conservatives are wrong. I have only suggested that they are true but partial. My critical writings have never attacked the central beliefs of any discipline, only the claims that the particular discipline has the only truth—and on those grounds I have often been harsh. But every approach, I honestly believe, is essentially true but partial, true but partial, true but partial. And on my own tombstone, I dearly hope that someday they will write: He was true but partial…
My ankle hurts from dancing last night, so there is pain, but the pain doesn't hurt me, for there is no me.
In other words, all of my books are lies. They are simply maps of a territory, shadows of a reality, gray symbols dragging their bellies across the dead page, suffocated signs full of muffled sound and faded glory, signifying absolutely nothing. And it is the nothing, the Mystery, the Emptiness alone that needs to be realized: not known but felt, not thought but breathed, not an object but an atmosphere, not a lesson but a life.
It is vision-logic with its centauric/planetary worldview that, in my opinion, holds the only hope for the integration of the biosphere and noosphere, the supranational organization of planetary consciousness, the genuine recognition of ecological balance…
The intricate dynamics of personal and group interaction -- and their interplay with structural forces -- are most visible only at the local level. I chose to conduct a case study precisely because it allows for a rich description and analysis of the processes that are all too often left in the realm of broad generalizations - racism, discrimination, backlash, "white flight"...Atlanta struck me as a logical site for such an analysis.
Atlanta...holds a singular place as the political and economic leader of the New South; it served as the headquarters for a number of civil rights organizations; it has been a center of black higher education. Furthermore, Atlanta has hailed itself as the 'city too busy to hate' -- one of 'progressive' race relations...Central figures in civil rights history - such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter White, Martin Luther King, Sr. and Martin Luther King, Jr., Whitney Young, John Lewis, Andrew Young, Vernon Jordan, Ralph Abernathy, and Julian Bond - have lived inside its limits at one time or another...While Atlanta, like any other city, is unique in certain ways, I do not believe it is unique in regard to its struggles over race and rights.
I love Wisconsin, I love coming here. I've performed here a lot because I've discovered that you people apparently have some sort of federal grant for drinking. [audience cheers] It's–you're insane! You pay less for liquor than anybody I know anywhere in the country. Nobody pays any less for liquor than you. What're you–what're you–HOW?! I don't know if you're using that farm subsidy money, or if you're just hijacking liquor trucks, but this is fucking insane. [audience member shouts something] Is it volume? It's unbe–fucking–lievable, it's staggering! I come here because basically if I spend four days here drinking, and even with the plane ticket, it's cheaper than drinking in New York. How do you know when it's New Year's? That's the big mystery to me. What's the difference? I've been in bars here and it's like New Year's every fucking night! "Uh, New Year's, that's when we–we drink with hats on."
This [Wisconsin] is the only state that I can tell this story in because you're the only people who understand it. Uh, one night I was performing in Milwaukee and I finished my set, and it was late in the evening, and I got a, had a scotch, and two of the waitresses sat down and had a brandy Old-Fashioned, and−and you're the only fuckers who drink that. More brandies get drunk in Wisconsin over Christmas than was drunk during the entire Second World War. I actually had a cab driver who was driving me back one night, and he said, "Son of a bitch, I was in New York City, and they didn't know how to make a brandy Old-Fashioned; I had to jump over the bar!" You people are NUTS! So, I was sitting there, and at that point, they ordered a shot of Jager. 'Cause I guess, you know...[Audience cheers] I love you, you're the only people who applaud Jager. And I'm telling you, something is wrong with that. You don't even know what's in it! Okay? That's wrong! You know how they make Jager? They take all the bar rags in this country, and they wring them into a–that's how they do it. And−and then, even when you lack a response, I can hear half of you going, "So what's wrong with that?"
There's a daytime NyQuil, and there's a nighttime NyQuil. Drink either one you want, because your cold doesn't give a shit what time it is. NyQuil comes in two colors: red and green. It's the only thing on the planet that tastes like red and green. And red and green are what? Christmas colors! That's right, NyQuil makes a dandy egg nog! Oh yeah, my friends bitched through the entire party, "This tastes like shit!" But at the end of it, we had a fun sleepover.
Al Roker was the weatherman in New York City, and three years ago we had a blizzard. We were supposed to have, according to Al, 4 to 12 inches of snow. That's his prediction. We had 36 inches. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, he was two feet off. THAT'S NOT EVEN IN THE BALLPARK! If you were a roofer and you built a roof and it was two feet off, you'd still be serving time. Al Roker makes 1.5 million dollars a year as a weather person, and he doesn’t know shit about the weather.
You don't want to go to Miami. Everybody's always delighted with it--no! Listen! The temperature down there is always over ninety and the humidity--and here's the problem--is way over 100%, way. And you know how it's over 100% humidity? When you're walking down the street for five minutes thinking to yourself, "You know, I should have put deodorant on my balls." That's over a hundred. Because that's not something you'd think of on your own.
I called the police. I said, "They've stolen my rental car, a Plymouth Horizon." The policeman said, "I guess they took it for a joyride." I said, "You know, I don't think you're listening, asshole. The car is a Plymouth Horizon. It is not a joy to ride!" This is a car that goes forty-five miles an hour with the wind; if you actually turn off the air conditioner you can supercharge the little fucker to forty-eight. I got a nosebleed I was having so much fun in the car. I didn't even want the piece of shit, so I was staggered to find out somebody took it.
The reason you should go to Las Vegas is because, for only the second time, the second time, ever, they have rebuilt Sodom and Gomorrah. It's back!! And you have the opportunity to see it before it turns to salt. And you wanna get out there before the Christian Right finds out what we're up to and shits all over it.
The best time to go to Las Vegas is during Christmastime, because there's no drug you can take that will recreate the experience of watching people gamble while they play Christmas carols. I'm Jewish, and I'm astonished. People going, "GODDAMMIT!" "JESUS CHRIST!" "HOLY FUCK!" "...pa-rum-pum-pum-pum, me and my drum."
People go to Vegas, and they don't know what to do; here's what you do. You go to the casino in your hotel. On your arrival, you get $100 in quarters. Take that $100 back to your hotel room and stare at it for a long, long time. Why? Because you're never going to see them again. Then you take those quarters to the bathroom and you flush them, one by one by one. And the nice thing about that is that every so often the toilet will back up, and you'll feel like a WINNER!
In four days, I experienced five seasons. It was thirty, it was sixty, it was ninety, then it was TWELVE! And on the last day, there was thunder, lightning, and snow--together! And I hadn't done drugs.
Normally, in February, in Boston and in most of the country, the weather is gray, rainy, gray, sleet, snow, gray; every day it just gets grayer and grayer and grayer! You wake up one day and you go 'I'm not coming into work today!' Your boss goes, 'Why not? You sick?' 'No! Its too gray!' Then you wake up and its the grayest day you've ever seen! And the next day it's even grayer! And that's usually Valentine's Day, and that's the day you look at your wrists and go, 'Hey, maybe I should slit 'em to see color!
I'll tell ya, in New York City, where I've lived far too long, 'fuck' isn't even a word, it's a comma.
I love New York City. The reason I live in New York City is because it's the loudest city on the planet Earth. It's so loud I never have to listen to any of the shit that's going on in my own head. It's really loud. They literally have guys come with jackhammers and they drill the streets and just leave cones in front of your apartment; you don't even know why. Garbage men come; they don't pick up the garbage, they just bang the cans together. And if your block's too quiet, they actually hire a guy who wanders around going, "FUCK ME! FUCK ME! FUCK ME!" … That was the first job I ever had.
The people who told us about sun block were the same people who told us, when I was a kid, that eggs were good. So I ate a lot of eggs. Ten years later they said they were bad. I went, "Well, I just ate the eggs!" So I stopped eating eggs, and ten years later they said they were good again! Well, then I ate twice as many, and then they said they were bad. Well, now I'm really fucked! Then they said they're good, they're bad, they're good, the whites are good, th-the yellows - make up your mind! It's breakfast I've gotta eat!
The moment in time that I believe that we completely lost our minds occurred in January of 1998. I was watching CNN when it occurred. It was 9 o’clock in the morning and they announced that the President of the United States may or may not have had oral sex with a 21-year-old in the White House, and that that, and now I’m QUOTING, “wasn’t the bad news.” And I hadn’t had coffee but I thought, “That’s pretty bad news. How could that not be bad news? HOW COULD THAT NOT BE BAD NEWS? What else did he do? Did he break into the how and BLOW AN ELEPHANT?” And they said, “No, the President may have made the young girl lie.” “Oh! How horrible! Made her lie? That’s still not the bad news you idiots because in order to make her lie, first, he would’ve had to take his penis...OUT OF HER MOUTH!”
Is oral sex adultery? Yes! That's the end of the fucking argument. There's nothing to discuss. If curling is an Olympic sport, then oral sex is adultery. And oral sex should be an Olympic sport. I would like to see that. Ice skating, then blowjobs. I certainly would stay through whatever commercials they had. I think oral sex should be an Olympic sport because it's harder than curling ever has been. And if you're any good at it, you deserve a medal.
My favorite health club is the International House of Pancakes. No matter what your weight is, there will always be someone who weighs 150 pounds more than you will ever weigh. It's guaranteed; it's on the back of the menu, read it sometime. They don't give you a cup of coffee, they give you a hot aisle of coffee! It's coffee for 15 people. Even if you're alone, they bring you a big jug of coffee, which makes me feel good 'cause I think maybe somebody's coming and I don't know who. So I put in the sugar and the milk and I drink the whole thing and then I go, "BRING ME SOME GODDAMN PANCAKES!" Son of a bitch, that's too much coffee. What's the matter with you people?
And so they turned to the Republican Party and they said, “Come on, get the little prick!” And so the Republicans took out their rifles, got him in their sights, then turned the rifles around and went…BAM! You want to learn one thing from this whole fiasco? If you’re going to hire a lawyer to nail somebody, you don’t hire somebody like Ken Starr. If you want to get somebody, and he was an asshole, you don’t hire a BIGGER asshole! ’Cause then the bigger asshole makes the asshole look like it’s just a rectum.
If it weren’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in college.
White people are potential humans - they haven't evolved yet.
Farrakhan: Is the Federal Reserve owned by the government? Audience: No. Farrakhan: Who owns the Federal Reserve? Audience: Jews. Farrakhan: The same year they set up the IRS, they set up the FBI. And the same year they set up the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith... It could be a coincidence... [I want] to see black intellectuals free... I want to see them not controlled by members of the Jewish community.
John Cage and I became interested in the use of chance in the 50's. I think one of the very primary things that happened then was the publication of the "I Ching," the Chinese book of changes, from which you can cast your fortune: the hexagrams.
Cage took it to work in his way of making compositions then; and he used the idea of 64—the number of the hexagrams —to say that you had 64, for example, sounds; then you could cast, by chance, to find which sound first appeared, cast again, to say which sound came second, cast again, so that it's done by, in that sense, chance operations. Instead of finding out what you think should follow—say a particular sound—what did the I Ching suggest? Well, I took this also for dance.
I was working on a title called, “Untitled Solo,” and I had made—using the chance operations—a series of movements written on scraps of paper for the legs and the arms, the head, all different. And it was done not to the music but with the music of Christian Wolff.
There will be a player greater than me.
I have no imagination. I never plan a drawing, they just happen.
Youth offers the promise of happiness, but life offers the realities of grief.
Even now, not a day goes by when I don't wish I could turn back the clock and change what happened.
So many people these days, it seemed, believed that these things (personal fulfillment and self-esteem) could come only from work, not from parenting, and many people believed that having children had nothing to do with raising them.
Her mother had once told her that there were men who kept secrets bottled up inside and that it spelled trouble for the women who loved them.
Mitch...was the kind of man who added something to everything he touched and everyone he came in contact with. I was envious of his view on life. He saw it all as a big game, where the only way to win was to be good to other people, to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and like what you see.
Why? Do you want to rescue me, too, Taylor? … That's what you're trying to do, isn't it? … I appreciate what you're trying to do, but it's not what I need right now. I need to handle this my own way.
Loving someone and having them love you back is the most precious thing in the world. It's what made it possible for me to go on...
We may have created a Frankenstein ['s monster].
Good morning, Mr. Greenspan. I understand that you did not take my friendly advice last fall. I thought maybe you should look for other employment, but I see you have kept your job.
The federal government has no right to treat all Americans as criminals by spying on their relationship with their doctors, employers, or bankers.
I was worn out, broken: He had taken almost everything. But he'd been all I'd had, all this time. And when the police led him away, I pulled out of the hands of all these loved one, sobbing, screaming, everything hurting, to try and make him stay.
I wondered if he ever thought of me, and hated the pang I felt when I told myself he didn't.
Behind the camera, I was invisible. When I lifted it up to my eye it was like I crawled into the lens, losing myself there. and everything else fell away.
After everything that happened, how could I miss him? But I did, I did.
I'd heard of Evergreen Care Center before. Cass and I had always made fun of the stupid ads they ran on TV, featuring some dragged-out woman with a limp perm and big, painted-on circles under her eyes, downing vodka and sobbing uncontrollably. We can't heal you at Evergreen, the very somber voiceover said. But we can help you to heal yourself. It had become our own running joke, applicable to almost anything.
Hey Cass, I'd say, hand me that toothpaste.
Caitlin, she'd say, her voice dark and serious. I can't hand you the toothpaste. But I CAN help you hand the toothpaste to yourself.
And she was good to me: strong, fun, and fiercely loyal. And if I didn't have many other friends because of her-most girls were intimidated by her looks, or thought she was too pushy, or just flat-out feared for their boyfriends-it never bothered me. I never missed having a wide, thick circle of girlfriends: Rina was more than enough. We were comfortable with each other's flaws and weaknesses, so we stuck together and kept to ourselves.
It's so easy to get caught up in what people expect of you. Sometimes, you can just lose yourself.
I had this wild thought that he was the only one in all this chaos who was just like me, and that was comforting and profound all at once.
Wake up, Caitlin, Mr. Lensing had said. But what he didn't understand was that this dreamland was preferable, walking through this life half-sleeping, everything at arm's length or farther away. I understood those mermaids. I didn't care if they sang to me.All I wanted was to block out all the human voices as they called me name again and again, pulling me upward into light,to drown.
What was the name of Pygmalion's sister?
She blinked, twice, obviously surprised. Ummm, she said, keeping her eyes on me. I don't know.
I jammed my hand in my jacket pocket, bracing myself for the next hit, and feel something. Something grainy and small, sticking to the tips of my fingers: the sand from Commons Park.
And that was as far as he got before i heard it. The thumping of footsteps, running up the lawn toward me: It seemed like I could hear it through the grass, like leaning your ear to a railroad track and feeling the train coming, miles away. As the noise got closer I could hear ragged breaths, and then a voice.
It was my mother.
I took his wildness from him and tried to fold it into myself, filling up the empty spaces all those second place finishes left behind.
Can she be divorced? I asked. And famous for her commercials and ideas?
She can be anything, Boo told me, and this is what I remember most, her freckled face so solemn, as if she knew she was the first to tell me. And so can you.
Well, it's New Year's now but I don't feel that way anymore. I wonder if you do either. Something's happening to me. It's like I'm shrinking smaller and smaller and I can't stop it. There's just so much wrong that I can't imagine the shame in admitting even the tiniest part of it. When you left it was like there was this huge gap to fill, but instead of spreading wide enough to do it I just fell right in, and I'm still falling. Like I'm half-asleep, and I can't wake up, can't wake up....
There were moments - when Jeopardy came on, in the car during radio trivia challenges, or for practically any question I couldn't answer in any subject - that Rogerson simply amazed me. I started to seek out facts, just to stump him, but it never worked. He was that sharp.
In physics, I sprung on him as we sat in the Taco Bell drive-through, what does the capital letter W stand for?
Energy, he said, handing me my burrito.
Sitting in front of my parents' house as he kissed me goodnight: Which two planets are almost identical in size?
Duh, he said, smoothing my hair back, Venus and Earth.
Rogerson, I asked him sweetly as we sat watching a video in the pool house, where would I find the pelagic zone?
In the open sea, he said. Now shut up and eat your Junior Mints.
It's funny how someone's perception of you can be formed without you even knowing it.
See you in dreamland.
If there's one thing I've learned in the last few months, it's that sometimes you just have to close your eyes and jump.
During this time we've been apart, it's you I've thought of when I'm at my weakest, and you who have pulled me through.
She was just a shell of her former self, functioning and talking but hardly alive.
I couldn't tell her. I couldn't tell anyone. As long as I didn't say it aloud, it wasn't real.
We laughed ourselves silly, taking back our shared past, gently, piece by piece.
I was running from one problem or place to another, with no time left to study, or sleep, or just breathe. I felt pulled in all directions, fighting to keep all these obligations circling in the air above me. It was only a matter of time before something fell.
I felt like I'd been swimming so hard, and the water growing warmer and warmer the closer I got to the top. I wasn't there yet, but now I could see the surface, rippling just beyond my fingers.
For two hours I'd felt myself stretching tighter and tighter, like a rubber band pulled to the point of snapping. And now, I could feel the smaller, weaker part of myself beginning to fray, tiny bits giving way before the big break.
Now I felt like I was drifting, sucked down by an undertow, and too far out to swim back to the shore.