I began praying whenever I thought of it—at my locker, during lunch, even in the middle of a quiz. I prayed more than I had ever prayed before, but I found it harder and harder to drift into the rhythm of sung prayers or into the nightly conversations with God. How could chanting and burning incense undo three minutes of a sunny August afternoon? It was like trying to move a sheet of blank paper from one end of a table to the other by blinking so fast that you started a breeze. [love that analogy]
I watched It’s a Wonderful Life on television in the living room. To me, the movie meant that if you become unhappy enough, almost anything can pass as happiness.
Why hadn’t people been nicer when it mattered? I wondered. [right?]
The quietness made me feel that the home was not as good as the hospital, that the nursing home was where the world put people who were not important, people who could be put away someplace and forgotten
The realization disturbed me. I saw that one day I would be nothing like who I was right then. I felt all alone
The sight of my mother in the kitchen caused my chest to hurt. Her belief that Birju could get better made me feel that she didn’t love us, that she valued believing something ridiculous over taking care of us, that she was willing to let us be hurt so she could have her hope.
I wanted us to be close, and so I began believing that we were.
At school, the guilt and sadness were like wearing clothes still damp from the wash. Whenever I moved, I felt as though I were touching something icy.
'I lie in my bed and listen to her cough and am glad she is coughing because this means she is alive. Soon she will die, and I will no longer be among the lucky people whose wives are sick. Fortunate are the men whose wives cough. Fortunate are the men who cannot sleep through the night because their wives’ coughing wakes them.' Writing the story changed me. Now I began to feel as if I were walking through my life collecting things that could be used later: the sound of a Ping-Pong ball was like a woman walking in high heels, the shower running was like television static. Seeing things as material for writing protected me. When a boy tried to start a fight by saying, “You’re vegetarian—does that mean you don’t eat pussy?” I thought this would be something I could use in a story..
As I wrote, I felt proud at my toughness for taking whatever was happening to me and turning it into something else.
Passing through the marshes covered in snow, I would have an aching sense of nostalgia. I was convinced that things would get worse and that one day I would look back on this period with longing. [right]
~all from Family Life. I'm not sure I'd have given it the Booker, but it was pretty good.
I didn't feel well all weekend, so I started rereading book 2 of the Harkness witch trilogy because book 3 just came out, so. I wanted comfort reading, like raman with an egg. Those are the books about witches written by an historian who throws in backstories to Marlowe plays etc, total schlockporn for PhD's in which I can wallow, going in and out of (simple) Latin and obscure references (I love a footnote!) to Malleus Maleficarum etc. It strikes me reading it this time that book 2 is all about whether they're "really" married or not, the witch and the vampire, what constitutes that, whether a promise made to a witch is binding in itself or if his vampire-family has to approve. The witch moves through continents and centuries, staring down one vampire in-law after another, getting more and more pissed off, and then stronger. Reading it, I feel like I did when I used to read those novels in which girls murdered their enemies and fed them to the rose bushes as mulch typa deal, when I was little-and-outraged. Patti and I were just talking about this the other day, what it means, the series that tweens want in any given historical moment, which is now the Hunger Games series so it's all about resisting the state for tweens now, but when we were 12, it was all about personal disempowerment, and the longing for belonging punished cruelly and then wammo you were sorry you'd been such an asshole. We had read Carrie like it was the book of revelation.
First it had been Ysabeau who's wished me out of her son's life. Backwin has made no effort to hide his disdain. Matthew's friend Hamish was wary of me and Kit openly disliked me. Now it was Phillipe's turn. I stood and waited for Matthew's father to look at me. When he did, I met his eyes squarely. His flickered with surprise. .. ~Shadow of Night, Deborah Harkness
