This week is my birthday! I’m turning twenty-eight.
Twenty-seven was a complicated and painful and lovely year all at once. When I think about who I was one year ago, I feel grateful for the healing and change I have experienced, mostly thanks to the people who love me.
Among other exciting developments, this year, my fiction came back to me. I have suffered from a fiction block for nearly five years. I simply could not write a piece of fiction I enjoyed—but that has changed recently, something unlocked, and it’s a true joy, a blessing, to dive back into a form of writing that remains an ideal for me.
I’m proud of what I wrote this year; still, since I’m trying to focus on external publication, most of it hasn’t appeared here. I can’t publish full pieces that I want to submit, but I can publish fragments, so I thought it would be fun to compile this list: twenty-seven sentences I wrote at twenty-seven. These sentences (or pairs of sentences—you get it) are personal favorites—sentences that feel like a seed, like a slice. Of course, quotes out of context never mean quite the same thing as they do in their larger piece, so keep an eye out for these sentences to reappear in their true form someday.
Hope you like ‘em,
—B
It’s strange to exist in the liminal space between minds, how do you think there? Your thoughts are no longer private, you work in public airspace. Little words prodding against each other.
Bringing it up was a conversational dead-end, a stumbling-out—the natural result of mentioning an intimate fact with no meaning and no continuity with any other fact. It only exposed a mutual hole.
She drops her head and, briefly, lives a semi-private moment. The camera has gone, but other cameras are still there—mine among them, and her own.
I imagined her thinking to herself, “She is the type of person to feed herself good food at a clean table,” and I was pleased.
There, in the raven dark, stood a lone orange light, not half as bold as the sun it imitated, barely reflected in the ocean tumult, but there, a beacon, manmade strike against the dark.
I needed a different reality, and as I walked away from them, I felt our realities separate like bubbles of soap; I was pushed into my own thoughts, no longer burdened by required words or actions.
Western novels have to be psychological now because that’s the only conflict we have left—otherwise we need to invent things, like war or apocalypse, to get a taste of physical necessity.
Spiritual malaise and mental anguish are a natural result of living in luxury that can only be obtained through exploitation: the end result of empire is self-cannibalism.
When she finally kills herself that’s when she finally comes back, his real wife, the wife he still loves. This is the dream of every abuser: once I punish her enough, she’ll get better.
Why is the question that corrodes.
”Congratulations,” says the world—“so you are a woman, after all. Enjoy those first-time feelings; it’s intoxicating, isn’t it, to be beautiful? But be careful: the first time you see the light shift in their eyes, you can never go back… to be a woman means you will be treated like one.”
Her body was merely an external appendage for her cold male spirit.
Yeah I remember you saying that a lot
you’d say I’m trying Well I am this time
I mean I always think I am but
sometimes I do feel more like a pebble
being thrown continuously off of cliffs
A swirl of warm purple unspooled from my throat. A hand curled around it like a vice and I swallowed in the shape of fingers. I wanted it, whatever it was. Whoever wasn’t behind the hand.
Maybe it’s a deepening of heart.
Sleep, I mean.
To fall asleep next to someone.
Big gulps of heart-
air fed it til it died.
Dead world went horroring
through stomach, liver, fish.Frisk
in the dark wet
vice of the dead world.
”When I was a little girl, an enormous desire rotted away inside of me. And I couldn’t express it, I didn’t know what it was for.”
My God, the day was so bright, all I could do was walk around inside of it, trying not to die.
You come back to the Midwest at high-corn season, the huge stalks lining up like rows of hairy legs.
Seattle as it is, Seattle has it, sleek and subtle, Seattle, like the sweep and rattle of a seagull trapping plastic.
Caught the Center City train through shaggy Philadelphia, the unwild wilderness, gold glass lakes peeling behind a plastic window. Powerlines and railroad tracks, a soft, romantic sky—lace clouds trimming a pink sun. And on the horizon, big fat stacks of clouds, heavy in the heat.
Because, and this is my secret, the one I can’t tell anyone else in this life because it won’t make sense to them—the secret is that I loved America, I loved it for the reasons everyone else scorned it, I loved it for its ugliness. I loved McDonald’s, for example. I also loved huge, wasteful American cars with big cup holders that could fit an enormous container of Diet Coke from McDonald’s.
It rained last night but I didn’t trust it was real rain, I kept looking upwards for the man-made cause. Just now I saw the pale moon on light blue, is it possibly the same real rock?
I believe:
That life is a constant process of dynamic change acting on static patterns; that this idea has been reached by many people and cultures over time, with different words to describe it; that a robust life is one lived in tune with Dynamic change while also seeking fruitful and stable static patterns; that a live lived in pure change is chaos, while a life without motion is limiting and degrading.
An emptiness filled the kitchen. Maria named the emptiness “peace.”
”The overwhelming fulfillment of my strongest desire was too much for me to process, it didn’t even feel good, instead I felt my heart shudder and heard my breath in my skull; the entire world became overbright and trembled. My mother walked away and I was left to an agonizing freedom. Even now, I feel a sense of tension, as though I still don’t know what I’m going to do. I see myself standing there, a skinny body salivating.”
A few families stood over the ocean, watching the sun strike diamonds off the water. But I sat in the car, staring at the white crests, unable to bring myself closer to it.
Here’s to another year, thanks for sticking around <3
As a birthday present, let me know: which sentence called to you and why?
4 called to me because I also want to become someone whom others think that when they see me. 😅 10 did also because it just felt too real to put into words in a single comment.
26 rings true