29 Quotes by Sondra Charbadze

I want to tell him that I learned to write when I was barely old enough to read, because the pain took me straight out of my body, both evading and yet demanding speech. I want to show him where it dropped me: the wasteland where words pant dry, where meanings wander hollowed of their sound-bodies, where new-born and unnamed realities mouth hungrily towards the sun, waiting to be seen into meaning.

Pain is always the origin of the ecstatic, that first spilling out of the body. We spill out of our mothers—bloodly, screaming, and then forever after are trying to keep ourselves un-spilled, untainted by greatand breaking pain (and thus love, and thus joy).

Where does the pain go when we die?does it stay in the bed as it begins to stink—does it racket through the home like a scream—do the children inherit it like a sprawling estate—And where does it go while we live?Maybe the pain is like me, desperate to be seen in the lives of those around me. I will abandon others again and again until I can finally be free of my own abandonment.

We are bathed in the same sky...We are bound by the same atmosphere which bifurcates our bodies. Somehow, this distance between our feet is a shared belonging.

Nothing is lost here, in this place before language, before longing. The love is the same, after all. Only the names change.

There are no great answers and no grand solutions. There are only small things that split open, revealing their seeds.

Can an unnamed thing be said to exist? Yes, but we can’t speak of it even in hushed voices. We can only dance around the invisible enemy. We can only evade.

This is another way of saying that “now” is nothing but a gathering place where the past, present, and future congeal, fester, and proliferate. To be a seer is to know that these three time-persons are a single Holy Trinity. The Holy comes not from a singular time-body, but from all three: Squatting in the gathering place. Breaking bread. Laughing.

A hunger to be small as a scrap of light, warmingstrangers without being seen, to be lost in the crack between cobblestones, in the sliver of space between lovemaking bodies, to be nothing more concrete than the exhalation of dust from a book. The urge to be obliterated and yet held on the surface of the skin: this is the paradox of the oppressed.