1
Maybe I will always have to love the idea of love or a concept of God more than I can love a person.Catherine Lacey
2
I sometimes wondered why I even answered the phone, but I guess I always had the hope that it would be someone else, some other way of life calling for me.Catherine Lacey
3
Past love is as good as a past dream, intangible, impossible to share.Catherine Lacey
4
He excused himself for a nap, and this day blended into his dreams like like years blended into a life, unseen but still felt, the line between memory and present always bleeding.Catherine Lacey
5
I hiked up a path and into the woods, thinking about what I should be thinking about and almost having a real feeling–a feeling like, this is really sad, this is a sad place to be, a sad part of my life, maybe just a sad life. The woods were not particularly beautiful. I was not impressed by the trees.Catherine Lacey
6
I couldn't decide how to feel about what he was saying, whether it was all nonsense or just more evidence that I would never understand this world.Catherine Lacey
7
Sex seemed like a thing that might only happen to me at random, outside my control, like the weather.Catherine Lacey
8
She was sure no one had ever been more in love than they were in those weeks, consumed by such longing, wanting to just be alive beside each other.Catherine Lacey
9
It was grotesque and eerie, too strange of a dream.Catherine Lacey
10
And he'd said nothing or something that amounted to nothing, and I tongued this memory like a burn in my mouth until the bathwater cooled and shook me back into my body where my fingerprints were ruffled.Catherine Lacey
11
Lately, I couldn't remember those years, as if childhood was a movie I'd only seen the previews to.Catherine Lacey
12
I closed my eyes, tried to get as far away from myself as I could.Catherine Lacey
13
I had never really stopped thinking of how the smartest person I knew had, after much thought, decided that life was not worth it–that she'd be better off not living–and how was I supposed to live after that?Catherine Lacey
14
He would never be that way again. He would never have the power of that specific kind of not-knowing.Catherine Lacey
15
I couldn't blame anyone for what was in me, because I am, like everyone, populated entirely by myself.Catherine Lacey
16
I was thinking about stabbing myself in the face–not actually considering stabbing myself in the face, but thinking that it would be a physical expression of how I felt.Catherine Lacey
17
I wondered for a moment if he was trying to get me to join a cult, but I realized it was just his youth talking, not a dogma.Catherine Lacey
18
I thought I detected a bit of wonder in his voice, that he'd like to become part of a story, any story.Catherine Lacey
19
Someone said once that they'd never heard of a crime they couldn't imagine committing, and I realized then that if I had a daughter and she had a rabbit and that rabbit was alone with me and I was feeling the way I felt right now and I had a way to kill that rabbit and the time to spend killing that rabbit then killing the rabbit was something I could imagine myself possibly doing or at least considering doing or being on the edge of doing. And smearing a husband with the blood wasn't such a far step after that if you had a desire to smear your husband with blood and smearing someone with blood was something I could imagine a situation calling for because there were at least a few people in this world that I wouldn't not like to see smeared with blood–one person being Werner for fucking my plans, for sending me back out into a life with my wildebeest, to figure out a way to live here and I didn't want to do that and I didn't know how to do that and I wasn't sure how I was going to do that– .Catherine Lacey
20
Every few minutes or so I would remember the look from the man who had wanted fifty cents, and I'd look at that framed memory hanging in myself and it meant I was here, back in this sick city, but in other ways I was not here at all and anyone who looked closely could see that I had nothing to give, that I was a junk drawer, a collection of things that may or may not have had a use.Catherine Lacey
21
I needed nothing and was needed nowhere. I almost doubted I was alive.Catherine Lacey
22
Speaking felt impossible, as contained and enclosed as she was, a longing that went on a loop, a longing for nothing at all.Catherine Lacey
23
You will never be missing to yourself and all you can do is delay, delay, delay and the delaying must be good enough for you and you must find a way to be fine with the delay because it is your whole life and the minute you really go missing is the minute you can no longer miss.Catherine Lacey
24
It depressed me to think that I might have been looking at another person but seeing only myself.Catherine Lacey
25
Maybe misery begins everywhere.Catherine Lacey
26
She missed his nothing. It had felt like something.Catherine Lacey