willowed pages

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.”

“Walking back from Somerville, we kept passing curbside piles of discarded household items. I pulled out a doormat that said I AM NOT YOUR DOORMAT. “It’s like it’s capable of self-deception!” I enthused. Joanne asked in a kind voice if I wanted to take it home and have it be our doormat. I imagined seeing it every day, this protesting resentful doormat: we would crush its conception of itself, again and again, with our feet. I replaced the mat where I had found it, between a CD tower and part of a disassembled futon. A few blocks later, Riley found another doormat that had seven cats on it spelling WELCOME with their tails. It was clearly the correct doormat.”

“Glass is transparent, right? And fragile. That’s the fundamental nature of glass. And that’s why objects that are made of glass have to be handled with care. After all, if they end up smashed or cracked or chipped, then they’re good for nothing, right, you just have to chuck them away. Before, we used to have a kind of glass that couldn’t be broken. A truth so hard and clear it might as well have been made of glass. So when you think about it, it was only when we were shattered that we proved we had souls. That what we really were was humans made of glass.”

“My anger scares me, my fear scares me, and somewhere in there is shame, too — why am I so enraged and so scared? I am afraid of going to bed and of waking up; afraid of tomorrow and of all the tomorrows after.”

“I suppose a part of me wished when I put my key in the door, it would magically open into a different apartment, a different life, a place so bright with joy and excitement that I’d be temporarily blinded when I first saw it…. I’d drop the keys and the coffee and wander in, spinning around with my jaw hanging open, shocked at the transformation of my dim, gray apartment into a paradise of realized dreams. But what would it look like exactly? I had no idea.”