Carmen Maria Machado

“Do you hate my body, Mom?” she says. Her voice splinters in pain, as if she were about to cry. “You hated yours, clearly, but mine looks just like yours used to, so—”

“Stop it.”

“You think you’re going to be happy but this is not going to make you happy,” she says.

“I love you,” I say.

“Do you love every part of me?”

Were we driving toward the storm, a photograph of the side mirror would reveal light in the past, and darkness in the future.

Twist me, and turn me, and show me the elf,” she finished. “I looked in the water and saw—”

She stopped, and I remembered.

“Myself,” I whispered.

“And show me the elf. I looked in the water and saw—”

When I tipped over and searched for my face, I saw nothing but the sky.

I took a step toward her. “It is my right to reside in my own mind. It is my right,” I said. “It is my right to be unsociable and it is my right to be unpleasant to be around. Do you ever listen to yourself? This is crazy, that is crazy, everything is crazy to you. By whose measure? Well, it is my right to be crazy, as you love to say so much. I have no shame. I have felt many things in my life, but shame is not among them.”

understood that knowledge was a dwarfing, obliterating, all-consuming thing, and to have it was to both be grateful and suffer greatly.

pulled my shaking body up to the vanity, glanced into the mirror, and for the first time, saw who I’d been looking for.

the realm of sense and reason it seemed logical for something to make sense for no reason (natural order) or not make sense for some reason (the deliberate design of deception) but it seemed perverse to have things make no sense for no reason.

What if you colonize your own mind and when you get inside, the furniture is attached to the ceiling? What if you step inside and when you touch the furniture, you realize it’s all just cardboard cutouts and it all collapses beneath the pressure of your finger? What if you get inside and there’s no furniture? What if you get inside and it’s just you in there, sitting in a chair, rolling figs and eggs around in the basket of your lap and humming a little tune? What if you get inside and there’s nothing there, and then the door hatch closes and locks?

is worse: being locked outside of your own mind, or being locked inside of it?

What is worse: writing a trope or being one? What about being more than one?