16 Quotes by Lara Williams

But we never really connected; standing side by side like soldiers, we were just marching through. It was sort of understood we wouldn’t stay in touch beyond the last summer of school. We were stand-ins for the people we were eventually supposed to meet.

Once unpacked, I saw my family downstairs. Each step released something spidery inside me: the sick-making terror of need.

Grief was messy. It didn’t have the elegance of longing, the poetry of heartbreak; its wholeness made it solid, its certainty made it base.

She had made a cheddar-and-parsley roulade. Lina had made a lentil goulash, plus almond-and-white-chocolate blondies. Emmeline had made two different types of risotto. Erin had made lamb-and-asparagus mini pies and a strawberry-and-spinach salad. Renni had made bread-and-butter pudding using chocolate croissants. Andrea had made a hearty beef goulash plus zucchini with feta and mint. Sash had made a giant pumpkin cheesecake. The kitchen was a kaleidoscope of smells.

I felt the weight of myself press into the carpet. I thought about how I was carrying only that weight, how I was responsible for no weight other than my own. All I had to carry through life was myself. I wished someone had told me that sooner.

I want to go home, I thought. I just want to go home. But I couldn’t attribute this feeling to any place I knew of.

Boredom is the hollow space that comes before anxiety. It is a void that needs to be filled. And anything you have flattened and confined - any tiny, manageable bad thoughts, not to speak fo the larger, less yielding traumas - in this space they bloat, becoming big-bellied, and surrounding them are a thousand feeding horseflies; bussing and nipping and whipping up the radio static that drives a person mad.

The line between pleasure and revulsion can seem so very thin, if it even exists at all.

Isolation was a strange thing. Sometimes the lack felt like a blank page, like a possibility.