The void is my friend.
Let me burn and burn until the whole empire is devoured, along with all its corruption, its villainy, its rot. Let me burn and burn until this night is not remembered, nor this year, nor this dynasty, until even history is buried in ash. And then maybe green things would grow again.
page 267, Maro
She will laugh. The sound is as strange, at Briar, as I imagine it must in a prison or a church. Sometimes, she will sing. Once we talk of dancing. She rises and lifts her skirt, to show me a step. Then she pulls me to my feet, and turns and turns me; and I feel, where she presses against me, the quickening beat of her heart–I feel it pass from her to me and become mine.
page 254
Waiting for the bus in the darkness, you pull on the hoody. It smells like her: sweet like the torn petal of a flower, sweet like lavender plucked from its stem while in summer bloom. You put your headphones on and load up Kelsey Lu’s EP, Church, an album full of orchestral loops designed to reach towards a quiet ecstasy. You could be anywhere right now, your eyes closed, enveloped in her presence, which is heavier in her absence. But you are home, amongst the melody, slipping into percussive breaks, breathing easy.
page 45
She sits on a chair and stares out at the greyness, at the studio at the bottom of the garden. She tries to ignore the stone in her abdomen, and though it has begun to move, to ripple at times, she cannot think of it as anything other than something inanimate. A heaviness that will sink her to the bottom of the ocean. Nothing can live in this environment, the acidic sorrow inside her.
page 104
There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up; holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind – wrapped tight like skin. Then there is a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive, on its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.
page 315