Rachel says that love is like a big black piano being pushed off the top of a three-story building and you’re waiting on the bottom to catch it. But Lourdes says it’s not that way at all. It’s like a top, like all the colors in the world are spinning so fast they’re not colors anymore and all that’s left is a white hum.
She is always sad like a house on fire - always something wrong.
What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t.
They grow up and they grow down and grab the earth between their hairy toes and bite the sky with violent teeth and never quit their anger.
Home. Home. Home is a house in a photograph, a pink house, pink as hollyhocks with lots of startled light.
And I think if my own Papa died what would I do. I hold my Papa in my arms. I hold and hold and hold him.
She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow.
But I think diseases have no eyes. They pick with a dizzy finger anyone, just anyone.
People who live on hills sleep so close to the stars they forget those of us who live too much on earth.
I know. Is waiting for a car to stop, a star to fall, someone to change her life.
But the truth has a strange way of following you, of coming up to you and making you listen to what it has to say.
Four Skinny Trees They are the only ones who understand me. I am the only one who understands them.
I wanted to will my blood to stop, my heart to quit its pumping. I wanted to be dead, to turn into the rain, my eyes melt into the ground like two black snails.
And when we look at each other, our arms gummy from an orange Popsicle we split, we could be sisters, right? We could be, you and me waiting for our teeths to fall and money. You laughing something into my ear that tickles, and me going Ha Ha Ha Ha. Her and me, my Lucy friend who smells like corn.
Sometimes you get used to the sick and sometimes the sickness, if it is there too long, gets to seem normal.
I don’t know why, but when you treat men bad, they love it.
You can never have too much sky. You can fall asleep and wake up drunk on sky, and sky can keep you safe when you are sad.
There’s that wide puffy cloud that looks like your face when you wake up after falling asleep with all your clothes on.
Everything is holding its breath inside me. Everything is waiting to explode like Christmas.
And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay. That’s what I tell Mama when she’s sad and needs to cry. Maybe she’s feeling three.
Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That’s how being eleven years old is.
About the truth, if you give it to a person, then he has power over you. And if someone gives it to you, then they have made themselves your slave. It is a strong magic. You can never take it back.