Junie

“The people who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else … learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.”

“I walk away when I can’t stand being near you any longer, knowing that if you touch me again I might burn up in the cold air. I never told you anything important about myself but if you had asked, if you had paused to listen, I would have said: my dreams take place in the rainy season.”

“There is a lion in my living room. I feed it raw meat so it does not hurt me. It is a strange thing to nourish what could kill you in the hopes it does not kill you. We have lived like this, it and I, for so many years. Sometimes it feels like we have always lived like this. Sometimes I think I have always been like this.”

“I just wanted to feel better. My own body is my deepest enemy. It wants, it wants, it wants, and when it does not get, it cries and cries and I punish it. How can you live in fear of your very self?”