1
Maybe that was the secret to happiness, I thought, being free of the responsibility of yourself.Alexandra Kleeman
2
He was so far away now, or maybe he just looked distant because we were imaging different things for our future.Alexandra Kleeman
3
Tell me, is there someone in your life who's been sharing your life too closely? A friend or a loved one? Is there someone who's been taking up your time and not giving any of it back?Alexandra Kleeman
4
I did have a friend, ' I said.' And your friend trespassed upon you, ' the Wally replied.Alexandra Kleeman
5
Standing there small among the boxes of Kandy Kakes that rose like brownish cartoon cliffs around him, he resembled the videos I'd seen of sea lions floating angelically among the kelp, black bodies filmed from below, their shapes cut out in bright sunlight, bodies mistakable for those of a human being. I felt the memory of a shadowy arm around me, a watcher again, sitting there on the couch with my boyfriend, watching the animals become prey. Somewhere there were giant whales feeding on creatures too small to see, pressing them against fronds of baleen with a tongue the size of a sedan. There were polar bears killing seals, tearing ovoid chunks from out of their smooth, round bellies. In the surrounding vastness of the warehouse, I heard something scratching against the concrete floor and knew there were rats here, scraping a thin film of nutrient from the dry packaged matter that surrounded them. Life was everywhere, inescapable, imperative.Alexandra Kleeman
6
There was no better way to live, or worse. It was all terrible, and you had to do it constantly,Alexandra Kleeman
7
I had seen the few things I cared about forget me seamlessly. I had seen the life I never really fit into heal up around my absence like a wound scabbed over.Alexandra Kleeman
8
These masked men were going to bring me to a cleaner place, where things were more sharply distinguished from one another and where I would finally have the space to figure out who I was without other people nudging me all the time into shapes they thought I should have.Alexandra Kleeman
9
There's a kind of pressure that your own life muscles onto you, to do something just like you would do, to behave just like yourself.Alexandra Kleeman
10
There was a hazy damp film in his eyes that I recognized from emotions in old movies, projected large on darkened screens.Alexandra Kleeman
11
Outside the windows, everything is getting darker. First the yellow dies from the light, then the green and pink. The world is a blue version of itself, momentarily, before the blue snuffs out, too and it is all night.Alexandra Kleeman