Laurel C

“Early on in our friendship we'd explored the possibility that we were in love, but those feelings had soon subsided and made space for something much more enduring, a multiyear conversation that went round and round, a true love without claim to ownership, a bracing pact in the face of every new circumstance in our respective lives.”
― Ia Genberg, Detaljerna

“My whole life I had believed that understanding myself required me to keep others at a distance, lined up on the far side of a river. That evening of counting I had not felt so certain. That evening I felt like a room with doors open, for others to explore, and that from their explorations I could start to ascertain my shape. We are not the people we think; we cannot really see who we are. Here, on Sunday in San Francisco, I had the same impression: that I might unfasten the locks and lower the draw-bridge; that I might not be a fortress but a space for others to pass through.”
― Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born?

“Ever since my friendship with Niki I think of the anecdote as a form of chronic illness that attaches itself to some people; that compulsion to tell everything in the shape of a story, to turn life into a formula meant to captivate, impress, upset, or inspire laughter. An anecdote is a sealed box that cannot yield anything other than more sealed boxes until every party to the conversation - or the
"so-called conversation" as Niki would put it - sits there with their own pile of sealed boxes, mentally obstructed, tied to the mast, and with the anecdote next in line tugging at their attention.”
― Ia Genberg, Detaljerna

“What is most important—what is hardest and also most important—is to be natural. Humans have a difficult time with “natural." We are better at "interesting" or "beautiful" or "forceful" than we are at "natural." Everything is an exertion, everything is performance. One of the reasons I have lived on Christopher Street for as long as I have is that I know how to be natural there. I can sit at the table. I can cook an egg. And once you have found the way to be natural, the rest of what's important can be layered over top: lucidity, beauty, force.”
― Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born?