Lia’s Void

"The fact is, people settle near volcanoes because the resulting soil is extraordinary, dense with nutrients from the ash. In this dangerous place their fruit is sweeter, their crops grow taller, their flowers more radiant, their yield more bountiful. The truth is, there is no better place to live than in the shadow of a beautiful, furious mountain."

"Even when sex between women was, in its own way, acknowledged, it functioned as a kind of unmooring from gender. A lesbian acted like a man but was, still, a woman; and yet she forfeited some essential femininity."

"Maybe, when queerness is so normal and accepted that finding it will feel less like entering paradise and more like the claiming of your own body: imperfect, but yours."

"Fantasy is, I think, the defining cliché of female queerness. No wonder we joke about U-Hauls on the second date. To find desire, love, everyday joy without men's accompanying bullshit is a pretty decent working definition of paradise."

"The Dream House was never just the Dream House. It was, in turn, a convent of promise (herb garden, wine, writing across the table from each other), a den of debauchery (fucking with the windows open, waking up with mouth on mouth, the low, insistent murmur of fantasy), a haunted house (𝘯𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘣𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨), a prison (𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘰𝘶𝘵), and, finally, a dungeon of memory. In dreams it sits behind a green door, for reasons you never understood. The door was not green.

"How many times had you said, "If I just looked a little different, I'd be drowning in love"? Now you got to drown without needing to change a single cell. Lucky you."

"You wondered, when she came along, if this was what most people got to experience in their lives: a straight line from want to satisfaction; desire manifested and satisfied in reasonable succession."

"You agree because, of course. Historically you've done just about anything for a beautiful woman."

"You were not always just a You. I was whole—a symbiotic relationship between my best and worst parts—and then, in one sense of the definition, I was cleaved: a neat lop that took first person—that assured, confident woman, the girl detective, the adventurer—away from second, who was always anxious and vibrating like a too-small dog breed of dog."

"How do we move toward wholeness? How do we do right by the wronged people of the past without physical evidence of their suffering? How do we direct our record keeping toward injustice?"

"The late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz pointed out that "queerness has an especially vexed relationship to evidence... When the historian of queer experience attempts to document a queer past, there is often a gatekeeper, representing a straight present." What gets left behind? Gaps where people never see themselves or find information about themselves. Holes that make it impossible to give oneself a context. Crevices people fall into. Impenetrable silence."

"Every time she speaks, you feel something inside you drop. You will remember so little about the dinner except that, at the end of it, you want to prolong the evening and so you order tea of all things. You drink it—a mouthful of heat and herb, scorching the roof of your mouth—while trying not to stare at her, trying to be charming and nonchalant while desire gathers in your limbs."

"I enter into the archive that domestic abuse between partners who share a gender identity is both possible and not uncommon, and that it can look something like this. I speak into the silence. I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice; measure the emptiness by its small sound."