#bk19

I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy.

History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.

I quite admit that I adored you madly, extravagantly, absurdly. I was jealous of every one to whom you spoke. I wanted to have you all to myself... One day I determined to paint a wonderful portrait of you. It was to have my masterpiece. It is my masterpiece. But, as I worked at it, every flake and film of colour seemed to me to reveal my secret. There was love in every line, and in every touch there was passion.

     “Frankie, I’ve got no words for feelings that are tearing me apart. What would our words sound like?” I looked up at the sky. “Like thunder, maybe.”      Frankie pressed her lips against my hair. “Yeah, like thunder. And yearning.”      I smiled and kissed the hard muscle of her biceps. “Yearning,” I repeated softly. “What a beautiful word to hear a butch say out loud.”

Vanity is a factor, but it is more a question of control. It is easier to trick others into perceiving you as beautiful if you can convince yourself you are beautiful. But mirrors have an uncanny way of telling the truth.

Eventually you can’t help but figure out that, while gender is a construct, so is a traffic light, and if you ignore either of them, you get hit by cars. Which, also, are constructs.

We hit and we kept on hitting; we were allowed to be what we were, frightened and vengeful—little animals, clawing at what we needed.

I don't know if anybody ever “wins” a war, Jeth. I think that the beginnin's of this war has been fanned by hate till it's a blaze now; and a blaze kin destroy him that makes it and him that the fire was set to hurt.