Deutsch

Doch ich war gerade dabei herauszufinden, dass dein Leben nicht deine Geschichte ist, sondern eine Geschichte über dich. 

Natürlich tust du so, als wärst du der Erzähler. Das musst du. 'Ich beschließe in diesem Moment, zum Mittagessen zu gehen', denkst du, wenn um 12 Uhr 37 das monotone Schrillen von oben klingt. Dabei entscheidet eigentlich die Glocke. Du hälst dich für den Künstler, aber du bist die Leinwand 

 

Sie sagte- mehr als einmal-, der Meteorschauer findet statt, über den Wolken, auch wenn wir ihn nicht sehen. Wen interessiert, ob sie küssen kann? Sie kann durch die Wolken sehen.

Aber man verabschiedet sich nicht, wenn man nicht vorhat, sich wiederzusehen.

 

 

Jeder Verlust ist anders. Man kann nie wissen, wie es für jemanden ist, nicht wirklich - jemand zu berühren war ja auch nicht dasselbe, wie in seinem Körper zu stecken

 

Englisch

 

anybody can look at you. it’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world as you.

 

…and no one ever says good-bye unless they want to see you again.

 

Spirals grow infinitely small the farther you follow them inward, but they also grow infinitely

large the farther you follow them out.

 

Your Now is Not Your Forever.

 

Imagine you’re trying to find someone, or even you’re trying to find yourself, but you have no senses, no way to know where the walls are, which way is forward or backward, what is water and what is air. You’re senseless and shapeless — you feel like you can only describe what you are by identifying what you’re not, and you’re floating around in a body with no control. You don’t get to decide who you like or where you live or when you eat or what you fear. You’re just stuck in there, totally alone, in this darkness. That’s scary

 

How concerned should I be that you haven’t said more than two words in a row all day?

 

And in the end, Harold’s imperfect audio system happened to be the last note in the melody of coincidences that changed my life

 

You tell yourself that you were careful not to touch the water, but your self replies, But what if you touched something that touched the water, and then you tell yourself that the wound is almost certainly not infected, but the distance you’ve created with that almost gets filled by the thought

 

“You can’t control it, that’s the thing,” I said. “Life isn’t something you wield, you know?”

 

“No,” I said. “I mean, I’m still crazy, if that’s what you’re asking. There’s been no change on the being crazy front.”

 

One of the challenges with pain-physical or psychic- is that we can really only approach it though metaphor

 

“You don’t talk much, Aza.” “I’m never sure what to say.” He mimicked me from the day we’d met again by the pool. “Try saying what you’re thinking. That’s something I never ever do.”

 

I’m sorry it’s not fun hanging out with me because I’m stuck inside my head so much, but imagine being actually stuck inside my head with no way out, with no way to ever take a break from it, because that’s my life

 

My favorite pictures of my dad are the few where he’s out of focus-because that’s how people are, really

 

Felt the tension between the urge to pull over and change the Band-Aid and the certainty of Daisy thinking me crazy. Told myself I was fine, this was a malfunction in my brain, that my thoughts were just thoughts

 

I thought, It’s happening, the it too terrifying and vast to name with anything but a pronoun

 

I guess at some point, you realize that whoever takes care of you is just a person, and that they have no superpowers and can’t actually protect you from getting hurt

 

It was so much easier to talk to him in the dark, looking at the same sky instead of at each other. It felt like we didn’t have bodies, like we were just voices talking

 

I couldn’t make myself happy, but I could make people around me miserable

 

“He’s cute and smart and I like him, but I’m not getting any better, and I just feel like if this can’t make me happy, then what can?“ “I don’t know. What can?” I groaned. “That’s such a psychiatrist move.”

 

My brain was quiet now that I’d done the thing it wanted me to do

 

There’s an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem that’s been rumbling around inside me ever since I first read it, and part of it goes: ‘Blown from the dark hill hither to my door/ Three flakes, then four/ Arrive, then many more.’ You can count the first three flakes, and the fourth. Then language fails, and you have to settle in and try to survive the blizzard

 

But she doesn’t remind me of the past, for some reason. She feels present tense

 

In the best conversations, you don’t even remember what you talked about, only how it felt

 

I was sort of relieved to be away from both my mom and Daisy for a while, not to feel the swirl of fear and guilt over being such a failure as a daughter and a friend

 

After we hung up, he texted me. I like us. For real. And somehow, I believed him

 

You never think much about weather when it’s good, but once it gets cold enough to see your breath, you can’t ignore it. The weather decides when you think about it, not the other way around

 

Please just let me out. Whoever is authoring me, let me up out of this. Anything to be out of this. But I couldn’t get out. Three flakes,then four arrive. then many more

 

It’s easy enough to say what it was like, but impossible to say what it was

 

The words used to describe it-despair, fear, anxiety, obsession-do so little to communicate it. Maybe we invented metaphor as a response to pain. Maybe we needed to give shape to the opaque, deep-down pain that evades both sense and senses.

 

I didn’t need Daisy to point out what a shitshow I was. I knew

 

not even a person just a deeply flawed line of reasoning

 

Thoughts are just a different kind of bacteria, colonizing you

 

“God, a lot happened since you lost your mind. Is that rude to say?“ “Actually, the problem is that I can’t lose my mind,” I said. “It’s inescapable.”

 

by forces so much larger than myself that I couldn’t even begin to identify them

 

I’m sorry it’s not fun hanging out with me because I’m stuck inside my head so much, but imagine being actually stuck inside my head with no way out, with no way to ever take a break from it, because that’s my life

 

What happened was relentlessly and excruciatingly dull: I lay in a hospital bed and hurt

 

Anybody can look at you. It’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see

 

I wanted to tell her that I was getting better, because that was supposed to be the narrative of illness: It was a hurdle you jumped over, or a battle you won. Illness is a story told in the past tense

 

They laughed because something was funny; I laughed because they had

 

Maybe I’m just a lie that I’m whispering to myself

 

But you’re slightly tortured, and the way you’re tortured is sometimes also painful for, like, everyone around you

 

I guess at some point, you realize that whoever takes care of you is just a person, and that they have no superpowers and can’t actually protect you from getting hurt

 

“I’m sorry.” “You say that a lot.” “I feel it a lot.”

 

I couldn’t make myself happy, but I could make people around me miserable

 

Over the next few months, I kept going. I got better without ever quite getting well

 

I like us. I like that we have our own way of doing things

 

When I was little, I knew that monsters weren’t, like, real. But I also knew that I could be hurt by things that weren’t real. I knew that made-up things mattered, and could kill you

 

It spans the whole alphabet, because we wanted you to know you can be anything

 

I tried to say that I felt dizzy and then felt myself falling, even though there was really nowhere to fall

 

I feel like a noose is tightening around me and I want out, but struggling only cinches the knot. The spiral just keeps tightening, you know?

 

It’s easy enough to say what it was like, but impossible to say what it was

 

My father died suddenly, but also across the years. He was still dying, really-which meant I guess that he was still living, too

 

And when I look for the, like, Real Me, I never find it. It’s like those nesting dolls, you know? The ones that are hollow, and then when you open them up, there’s a smaller doll inside, and you keep opening hollow dolls until eventually you get to the smallest one, and it’s solid all the way through. But with me, I don’t think there is one that’s solid. They just keep getting smaller

 

Over the next few months, I kept going. I got better without ever quite getting well

 

“God, a lot happened since you lost your mind. Is that rude to say?“ “Actually, the problem is that I can’t lose my mind,” I said. “It’s inescapable.”

 

I kind of just want to stay here in this particular instant for a really long time