mego wego

“I began to wonder why I felt like I had to choose one thing over another. I was all of these things. I was a plurality. And I was one thing, one word. I was who I said I was. I had said to Professor Slotten: I'm Phuc. I circled back to my name, the only Phuc I had ever met and the only noun I had for who I was.”
― Phuc Tran, Sigh, Gone: A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In

“I think about how often me and the boys I knew and know were taught to love each other through expressions of violence. How, if that is our baseline for love, it might be impossible for us to love anyone well, including ourselves.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

“One way trauma can impact us is by the way it makes us consider a polite proximity to violence and oppression as comfort.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

“I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska