34 Quotes by Monica Drake

In the middle of a wrist’s suicide slash-line, below the layered skin and above the pulse, there’s an acupuncture point that says, Get back to who you were meant to be. This is the heart spot, the center. Your whole life the skin on that place will stay closest to being a baby’s skin, as close as you can get anymore to the way you started, the way you once thought you’d always be.

Come with me, Mack,” I said. “Back to my place.” I tried to pull my hand back. Our fingers were intertwined like those bloody hospital robes. I didn’t mind, even when he scared me a little. The blood that kept us alive was trapped just under our skin, racing through veins. All those cells inside and out were fighting for a way to move closer together, beyond the trap of skin, dependent on breath.

Outside the window, one lone car passed and threw a violent blast of rainwater over the sidewalk. It was a storm, by now. Looking at that rain, I was falling deeply in love with our warm bar. What could you do, with a world like that? I was in love with every minute of being alive even as I floundered.

My head was so light. Wind sang through the field grass. The same wind brushed hair off my face, soft as my mother’s hand, and when the falling snow started to clump into flakes, each thick flake came down with the love of a frozen kiss, like somebody was saving up, freezing their warm love for later.

I thought I was old, back then. I thought I was grown up. I didn’t know all my big mistakes were up ahead of me, still to come. Always.

The day Travis met Lu he was in his best suit – dark blue, pinstripes, a necktie. Women his age would see right through his sweat and pretense. Any woman his age, she’d say, “What, you work at Men’s Warehouse now?” Yeah, a woman would know a cheap suit was like an easy costume, but the girls didn’t catch on.

The moon was now paper-thin and fading. That moon was sky-tinged, the way you could see right through it to the blue of the evening light, and it was hung like a damp tissue as though pressed against glass.

I, American in body and spirit, healthy, debauched and dedicated to travel, had no date. I felt a simmering discontent. What good was freedom when I wasn’t free to hand it over, what use was the currency of my body if I couldn’t spend it?

This was my language. The house was talking to me. It was telling me about my own mistakes: they don’t go away. The trash goes out, but it seeps back in tiny increments, like the backflow of blood, the rush that causes a heart murmur.