ARTIFICE OF THE HEART

I have created the isolation in which I find myself.

This girl who stands so quiet and grave at the mouth of hell. This girl who is all quietness and sanity and innocence. You wondered why I wanted her?

Avoid the company of persons with whom you cannot be totally forthright. Be sincere or be silent. Speak the whole truth, as you see it, or do not speak at all.

At some point, being angry is just another bad habit, like smoking, and you keep poisoning yourself without thinking about it.

it is a serious thing just to be alive     on this fresh morning         in this broken world.

It is always important to know when something has reached its end. Closing circles, shutting doors, finishing chapters, it doesn’t matter what we call it; what matters is to leave in the past those moments in life that are over.

If the snake could talk, he’d tell you the first several times he shed his skin were painful. It’s not now, but he still has the memory. To lose a piece of you is an ache you can’t put into words. He would say, child, growing hurts no matter how you do it. All that stretch. The tug-of-war with your skin. I could make this pretty, say there are valleys and rivers sprouting beneath you. But I’m tired of turning pain to beauty. When I press my finger to the bruise, it only hurts. I shed my skin and turn to walking pulse. Throb. Raw skin and stretch marks. Clean, again. This time: No tears. There’s no use in crying over nature doing it’s job. The skin becomes too snug, too tight around the throat, so you shed it or you constrict and lose your ability to breathe. The snake says, you can’t fit back into dead skin. There’s no blood or life there. Your heartbeat has to rewrite itself to fit this new body.

I am so afraid of disappointing the people I love, I often forget that I am someone I love too. And I need kindness just as much as I believe the people I love do.

It’s a night in Ohio where a man sleeps alone one week and the next, the woman he will eventually marry leans her body into his for the first time, leans a kind of faith, too—filled with white crickets and bouquets of wild carrot. And the months and the honeyed years after that will make all the light and dark squares feel like tiles for a kitchen they can one day build together.

If I am a witch, then so be it, I said. And I took to eating black things - huitlacoche the corn mushroom, coffee, dark chiles, the bruised part of fruit, the darkest, blackest things to make me hard and strong.

Breaking up is the hardest thing we do. It’s the most important thing we do, in a way. You’ve got to embrace rejection, or you’ll maintain a very limited life. It’ll be very nice and neat - and very, very small.

You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it’s just teeth.