”I loved the writers who made you look through every line, to gaze downward and feel the vertigo of the depths, the blackness of inferno.”

And to keep under control the anxieties of change I had, finally, taught myself to wait patiently until every emotion imploded and could come out in a tone of calm, my voice held back in my throat so that I would not make a spectacle of myself.

If I am exposed to ants, I will fight the ants. If I am exposed to thieves, I will fight the thieves. If I am exposed to myself, I will fight myself.

A woman can easily kill on the street, in the middle of a crowd, she can do it more easily than a man. Her violence seems a game, a parody, an improper and slightly ridiculous use of the male intent to do harm.

We are occasions. We consummate life and lose it because in some long ago time someone, in the desire to unload his cock inside us, was nice, chose us among women.

I was not the woman who breaks into pieces under the blows of abandonment and absence, who goes mad, who dies. Only a few fragments had splintered off, for the rest I was well. I was whole, whole I would remain. To those who hurt me, I react giving back in kind. I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the dark serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.

We don't know anything about people, even those with whom we share everything.

I felt something move inside me, a jolt of grief so intense that the tears seemed to me fragments of a crystal object stored for a long time in a secret place and now, because of that movement, shattered into a thousand stabbing shards.

I was like a lump of food that my children chewed without stopping; a cud made of a living material that continually amalgamated and softened its living substance to allow greedy bloodsuckers to nourish themselves, leaving on me the odor and taste of their gastric juices.

I didn't want to run, if I ran I would break, every step left behind disintegrated immediately afterward, even in memory,(…).

His desire had been to skate far away from us on an infinite surface; mine, it seemed to me now, was to go to the bottom, abandon myself, sink deaf and mute into my own veins, into my intestine, my bladder.

I had arrived at the edge of some precipice and now I was falling, as in a dream, slowly, even as I continued to hold the thermometer in my hand, even as I stood with the soles of my slippers on the floor, even as I felt myself solidly contained by the expectant looks of my children.

I had to tear the pain from memory, I had to sandpaper away the scratches that were damaging my brain.

"Stop or I'll cut off your hands," she would say when I touched her dressmaking things. And those words were a pair of long, burnished steel scissors that came out of her mouth, jawlike blades that closed over the wrists, leaving stumps sewed up with a needle and thread from her spools.

How heavy a body that has been traversed by death is, life is light, there's no need to let anyone make it heavy for us. 

How could I scrape them definitively off of my body, my mind, without finding that I had in the process scraped away myself?