Sublime

She is proof that there is nothing that cannot happen to someone. That the world doesn’t need permission, that there is no novel evil it won’t embrace.

If my mission in life had been reduced to being well at all costs, then the illness had won.

Rather, as I got sicker that winter, I no longer had the sense that I was a distinct person. On most days, I felt like a mechanism that moved arduously through the world simply trying to complete its tasks.

Edwidge Danticat story: “Shame is heavier than a hundred bags of salt.”

I watched the lives of others with a sense of wistfulness. I missed the burn of Scotch in my throat, the loose joy of a dinner party where everyone got a little high on talk. I wanted to be sloppy and fun again. “How are you doing?” Gina asked one morning. “I don’t know if I can take this anymore,” I told her. “I just want to get better. I want to

implacable,

Je m’étais passablement dégarni au cours de ce dernier mois.

“You know, I don’t think she ever lost her shit around her white friends.” “Yeah, well,” Erin said ruefully, “we were family.”

I’d spent my life waiting for people to reach their place of comfort with my disability so that they’d forget about it and then I could be seen. Of course, I’d succeeded only in erasing a part of myself.