aprillovessnakes

“Trauma isn’t just the sadness that comes from being beaten, or neglected, or insulted. That’s just one layer of it. Trauma also is mourning the childhood you could have had. The childhood other kids around you had. The fact that you could have had a mom who hugged and kissed you when you skinned your knee. Or a dad who stayed and brought you a bouquet of flowers at your graduation. Trauma is mourning the fact that, as an adult, you have to parent yourself. You have to stand in your kitchen, starving, near tears, next to a burnt chicken, and you can’t call your mom to tell her about it, to listen to her tell you that it’s okay, to ask if you can come over for some of her cooking. Instead, you have to pull up your bootstraps and solve the painful puzzle of your life by yourself. What other choice do you have? Nobody else is going to solve it for you.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

“Tomorrow would dawn fragrant with the smells of yesterday, until tomorrow becomes yesterday and so on. Nothing changes in Forever, nothing.”
― Storm Constantine, Wraeththu

“and then the figure, turning slowly round, discovered to Frederic the fleshless jaws and empty sockets of a skeleton, wrapt in a hermit’s cowl. “Angels of peace protect me!” cried Frederic, recoiling. “Deserve their protection!” said the spectre.”
― Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto

“Just then he is overcome by a familiar sense of sadness, typical of those convinced of their own impending death. The world around him feels like stage scenery painted on a paper screen, as if he could stick a finger into this monumental landscape and drill a hole in it leading straight to nothingness. And as if nothingness will start
pouring out of there in a flood, and will catch him up too, grab him by the throat. He has to shake his head to be rid of this image. It shatters into droplets and falls onto the leaves.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story