chichio's reviews
162 reviews

When I first started here, there was a detailed manual that taught me how to be a store worker, and I still don’t have a clue how to be a normal person outside that manual.

To narrate our horrors, what’s the point of science if not to narrate our horrors? El Cuco thought, What’s the point of technology if not to narrate our horrors? What’s the point of languages, screams, keyboards, wells if not to narrate our horrors? 

The creation of your “I” began with violence, and there wasn’t anything beautiful about the process, or maybe there was, but how would they ever understand it? How would they ever understand you if they couldn’t even pronounce you? 

I once told Irene that what that man had done to them was a monstrosity, and she looked at me like I was a child. ‘He’s a man, not a monster,’ she said, and I understood what she was saying so clearly that I never brought it up again. Do you get what she was trying to tell me? Well, tío, that they weren’t victims of a monstrosity, but of a humanity. 

I am only a mother on paper, because motherhood is a life sentence (but I don’t feel like a mother anymore). Like what happens to the fruit fly in the YouTube videos, you go in through a little hole thinking you’re headed for something sweet and then you’re trapped and you can never get out.

She loves her parents, she does, but it’s a prickly, complicated love, and suddenly Helen is swept up in a hopeless feeling that maybe all she’s capable of is prickly, complicated loving. Maybe even with Grant Shepard permanently, safely in the rearview mirror, she’ll never be able to love simply and without disclaimers.

She used to rub lavender behind my ears before I went to school and in this way I felt that She too was always watching me.

There is a time, she thinks, at the start of any relationship, when the process of falling in love softens a personality, like wax in a warm room. And so two people in love change, just a little, pushing their wax figures together, a protuberance here smoothed down but creating a dip there. It doesn’t last long, the time when love can gently change who you are, and in the relationships that she’s visited over the last six months, the moment has long passed.

You can’t trauma-proof life, and you can’t hurt-proof your relationships. You have to accept you will cause harm to yourself and others. But you can also fuck up, really badly, and not learn anything from it except that you fucked up. It’s the same with oppression. You don’t gain any special knowledge from being marginalized. But you do gain something from stepping outside your hurt and examining the scaffolding of your oppression. You’ll find the weak joints, the things you can kick in. When I look back at myself on the bridge year, I see that I thought I was doing something constructive, escaping exploitation by becoming exceptional. In fact, what I was doing was squeezing my eyes shut and singing la la la at the gathering darkness, as if the gathering darkness cared that I couldn’t see it. 

Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel. 

I’m certain that blue eyes would taste amazing, much better than brown ones. Especially George’s eyes. I have no scientific evidence to prove this, but to me there’s nothing appetizing about brown. Brown is the mud scraped off the bottom of your shoe or the muck left at the bottom of the sink when you’re done washing the dishes. Brown is the color of decay.