sharp and efficient enough to last me the rest of my life.
2) I'd pause confrontationally, like some Dickensian ghost, imagining
that my presence served as an uneasy reminder if what might be.
3) I am filled with questions I rarely allow myself, such as, how do
we go about turning into the people we are meant to be? What relation
do the human beings in that picture have to the people they are now?
How is it that all of us were caught together in that brief moment of
time, me standing there pretending I wasn't hurt by a single thing in
this world while they lined up for their turn on the pony, some of the
excited and some of them scared, but all of them neatly, at my
insistence, one in front of the other, like all the days ahead.
4) How could one doubt that the order in which one was picked for the
softball team was anything but concurrent with the order in which Life
would he handing out favors?
5) I was a tomboy par excellence.
6) Anxiety and anticipation, I was to learn, are the essential
ingredients in (i)suffering(i) from pain, as opposed to feeling pain
pure and simple.
7) When a film's heroine innocently coughs, you know that two scenes
later, at most, she'll be in an oxygen tent; when a man bumps into a
woman at the train station, you know that man will become the woman's
lover and/or murderer. In everyday life, where we cough often and are
always bumping into people, our daily actions rarely reverberate so
lucidly. Once we love or hate someone, we can think back and remember
that first casual encounter. But what of all the chance meetings that
nothing ever comes of? While our bodies move ever forward on the time
line, our minds continuously trace backward, seeking shape and meaning
as deftly as any arrow seeking its mark.
8) A year before, my class had gone on a field trip to a museum where
I became fascinated with a medieval chart showing how women contained
minute individuals, all perfectly formed and lined up like so many
sardines in a can, just below their navels. What's more, these
individuals contained more minute versions of themselves, who in turn
held even more. Our fates were already perfectly mapped out within us,
just as we once waited perfectly inside of our mothers, who themselves
were held within the depths of their mothers, our great-grandmothers.
9) Sometimes it is as difficult to know what the past holds as it is
to know the future, and just as an answer to a riddle seems so obvious
once it is revealed, it seems curious to me now that I passed through
all those early moments with no idea of their weight.
10) This went against every belief I held dear. One had to be good.
One must never complain or struggle. One must never, under any
circumstances, show fear and, prime directive above all, one must
never, ever cry. I was nothing if no harsh.
11) The chaos held me tightly, endlessly.
12) I began a lifelong affair with nostalgia, with only the vaguest
notions of what I was nostalgic for.
13) I felt my face flush. Things seemed to rush at me as if I were the
focal point of some unseesable camera's close-up. Immediately I
regretted all my assumptions. The embarrassment I felt then stays with
me still, though of course it wasn't embarrassment. That feeling was
about as different from embarrassment as a patch of soil is from a
tree, an egg case from a spider, a lump of stone from a sculpted hand
lying heavily on an even stonier lap. It was the moment when I
understood unequivocally: I was in this alone.
14) Sometimes the briefest moments capture us, force us to take them
in, and demand that we live the rest of our lives in reference to them.
15) The second week of chemo was worse in that I knew what to expect.
This presented a curious reversal of fear for me, because I already
understood that with other types of pain the fear of not knowing about
it usually brought about more suffering than the thing itself. This
was different. This was dread. It wasn't some unknown black thing
hovering and threatening in the shadows; it had already revealed
itself to me and, knowing that I knew I couldn't escape, took its time
stalking me. This was everything I ever needed to know about Fate.
16) Moments never repeat themselves exactly.
17) I viewed other people both critically and sympathetically. Why
couldn't they just stop complaining so much, just let go and see how
good they actually had it? Everyone seemed to be waiting for something
to happen that would allow them to move forward, waiting for some
shadowy future moment to begin their lives in earnest. Everybody, from
my mother to the characters I read about in books (who were as actual
and important as real people to me), was always looking at someone
else's life and envying it, wishing to occupy it. I wanted them to
stop, to see how much they already had, how they had their health and
their strength. I imagined how my life would be if I had half their
fortune. Then I would catch myself, guilty of exactly the thing I was
accusing others of. As clear-headed as I was, sometimes I felt that
the only reason for this clarity was to see how hypocritically I lived
my own life.
18) Pain, if nothing else, was honest and open — you knew exactly
what you were dealing with.
19) Beauty, as defined by society at large, seemed to be only about
who was best at looking like everyone else.
20) Life in general was cruel and offered only different types of
voids and chaos. The only way to tolerate it, to have any hope of
escaping it, I reasoned, was to know my own strength, to defy life by
surviving it.
21) Now I knew that joy was a kind of fearlessness, a letting go of
expectations that the world should be anything other than what it was.
And I felt I'd at last discovered the means with which to actively
seek out this kind of being, this kind of beauty.
22) The general plot of life is sometimes shaped by the different ways
genuine intelligence combines with equally genuine ignorance.
23) I read various philosophers and imagined my soul, separate and
clear of my heart and mind. At times I was so lonely I was amazed I
didn't just expire right there on the spot, as if loneliness that
strong were a divine thunderbolt that could strike me down at any
moment, whether I was in bed, at a crowded dinner table, or an epty
roadside stop.
24) I used to think truth was eternal, that once I (i)knew(i), once I
(i)saw(i), it would be with me forever, a constant by which everything
else could be measured. I know now that this isn't so, that most
truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all our
lives to remember the most basic things. Society is no help. It tells
us again and again that we can most be ourselves by acting and looking
like someone else, only to leave our original faces behind to turn
into ghosts that will inevitably resent and haunt us. As I sat there
in the café, it suddenly occurred to me that it is no mistake when
sometimes in films and literature the dead know they are dead only
after being offered that most irrefutable proof: they can no longer
see themselves in the mirror.
miki
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