“I’ve done some rash, impulsive shit in the name of love—built monuments to things that didn’t last. I mapped out futures for people who never asked for permanence.”

“Novelty is a particularly dense manifestation of relying on the Other to become simultaneously the grounding of and the escape from the Self.”

“I was a veritable saint. Not that I was opposed to doing any of those things, I just didn’t happen to do them, I didn’t know how to be more of a sinner.”

“Even at its inception, friendship demands sincerity. Sadeeq derives from sidq, truth, so the bond begins not in affection, but in honesty.”

“My grandmother died three years before I was born, when my mother was pregnant with my older brother. I cannot tell you what that time was like, because no one speaks of it.”

“I was 15 years old when my mother decided to become a vampire.”

“We were born with matching mirrored birthmarks—one above the right kneecap, and the other above the left.”

“Her words had stung a little. Maybe I was soft. But I hadn’t complained when she’d told me to pack a weekend bag after our third coffee date.”

“Silence stays until next November when he coils and uncoils his fingers around the chain of survival, flirting with his own demise.”

“Perhaps, alongside these vibrations of being, we can rest, mourn, be anxious and tired, cringe, dance, rot, fuck, crumble, ferment, fight.”

“I believe in the holiness of the common & of worms. Also roly-polies.”

What if, when you ran your fingers along the embroidery, you could hear the voices of your ancestors? 

“Tinkering a Way, Together: An Interview with Plastivap Inventor Mirukosee Balan”

Blue ash of skin between the rubble, a child’s body buried beneath concrete, these images are stitched beneath my eyelids, stuck.

The sinking feeling trailed me as I worked my way around the room: There’d been a precious opening, and I’d wasted it.