Sandra Baiju

“We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.”

“The worst thing in the world can happen, but the next day the sun will come up. And you will eat your toast. And you will drink your tea.”

“We’ll be happy ever after, the queen wanted to whisper to her daughter as they flew, but she knew that was not true. Life never is that way. And so instead she held her daughter in silence, heart to heart, and as they traveled each heart drew on the other’s strength, so that when they reached their destination they would be ready.”

“What an effort I make to be myself. I struggle against a tide in a boat with just enough room for my two feet in a perilous and fragile balance.”

“A poem begins with a lump in the throat.”

“The strongest ones are the ones who have every reason to die but still live.”

“I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go.”

“I’m so unwhole. I don’t know where all the pieces of me are, how to fit them together, how to make them stick. Or if I even can.”

“I dream of places I have never been, but I dream of them often so they are familiar.”

“It feels like a punch. Tears fill my eyes, and I wonder how I could be upset over losing something I never had.”

“Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorize. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person, as much a part of one’s being as laughing easily or having red hair.”

“I don’t want you to think I got through this undamaged, okay? But I’m learning to live with it. Because otherwise, the damage is all you are.”

“Love is like a brick. You can build a house, or you can sink a dead body.”

“His masterpiece was a dead end — but isn’t that true of any masterpiece?”

“And I realized that there’s a big difference between deciding to leave and knowing where to go.”