Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora
46 quotes
"Don't fall in love or let anyone's life become more important than your own."
"My brain came alight with tenderness for her. I felt so sorry for everything. I yearned to embrace her, kiss her even, to stay with her, always her, my sister, my friend to the end. It was a story after all, even if a sick one. It was completely ours."
"I wanted to walk faster, to run, far as possible from her, from my entire life, from the first day I ever saw her always just a few steps ahead."
"I am a memory house for those I have lost, those I no longer know."
"We remained talking, fighting gently or viciously for what seemed like hours, but it was only minutes or perhaps a second, because it was only a dream."
"I meditated on my childhood, vague and distant before high school, where Laura still flickered only on the edge of things."
"Our past would dissolve. We would move on from each other and from the ghosts of our youth."
"My loves have always been seared with this singing, this singing written by death, the way some lands have always been crippled by war."
"I inherited this longing. I was addicted to it. And so I was at home with those who wanted and never had enough. I was at home in the places that could never be. The places found only in dreams."
"Nightmares always recur, but never our most beautiful dreams."
"I slowly lost any dream for myself. No one warned me of this, that the stars in New York can infect the light inside, that they can trap you in their shadow. Dylan was of course a star. He had achieved the thing we all came to New York wanting."
"We are all cursed. We live in the era of the curse. A world that cannot be fixed. The best thing would be an alien ship. Another planet. One with three moons. But you, I saw you in my dreams. I saw you coming. You came to heal my broken heart. That's why I named you Ahlam."
"When I returned to New York, it had already changed. I always wished things could just remain."
"With the years, we become even more ourselves and call this change."
"For those I come from, there is nothing more devouring than the feeling of want for home, the feeling of need for home. We are all waiting for a form of transport, a ship, a saucer to carry us out of the too-dark night."
"I first understood why Christians prayed for a savior in the form of a beautiful man. He had absolved me of the blue-streaked blond."
"It was all so foolish then, as it is now, as it is forever. To be in love with beauty. To try to hold on to it."
"I knew beauty for me would only ever be derived from loss."
"There is the body of history ever atop of us, and the body of memory rustling within us. Between the two, we are crushed."
"I look out at the reservation, still and glittering with casinos, and think of all the death dried up and buried in its dirt."
"I understood it in my bones. Longing made the music bigger."
"This is it. This is how I always saw heaven, always by the sea, always by night, always in the dark."
"With this man I will never want. With this man I will never be sad again."
"I remember wanting to flee her, and being unable to flee her, so in need of her and half hating her for it, and I still am nauseous from it."
"I have forgiven Sonora. I have forgiven New York, forsaken the recursion of history. But I do not yet know how to forgive myself."