Extraits

I have forgotten that I am a twenty-five-year-old woman. The heart Rob Valencia holds in his hand is a seventeen-year-old heart, wraped and badly drawn with purple ink. It is Samantha Heather Mackey's seventeen-year-old idea of her heart. And it has Rob Valencia's name drawn inside in jagged, bleedy letters.

“She was a great girl-shaped forest. She was a thing on fire. Her hand was leaves and smoke and snow and flesh all at once.”

“What do you think, Samantha?” Fosco asks me. That it’s a piece of pretentious shit. That it says nothing, gives nothing. That I don’t understand it, that probably no one does and no one ever will. That not being understood is a privilege I can’t afford. That I can’t believe this woman got paid to come here. That I think she should apologize to trees. Spend a whole day on her knees in the forest, looking up at the trembling aspens and oaks and whatever other trees paper is made of with tears in her languid eyes and say, I’m fucking sorry. I’m sorry that I think I’m so goddamned interesting when it is clear that I am not interesting. Here’s what I am: I’m a boring tree murderess. But I look at Vignette, at Creepy Doll, at Cupcake, the Duchess. All of them staring at me now with shy smiles. “I think I’d like to see more of the soup too,” I hear myself say.”

“They laugh. What’s so fucking funny? I want to say. But I don’t. I laugh with them. Ha. Haha. Hahaha.”

“But I wasn't listening. I wasn't stopping. Because we were already running away again, me and my imagination.”

“The poets brace themselves for imminent, overeducated poverty.”

“We never joke about bunnies, Bunny.”

“Why do you lie so much? And about the weirdest little things?", my mother always asked me. "I don’t know", I always said. But I did know. It was very simple. Because it was a better story.”

La nuit est une chute d’eau faite de musique et de lumière. La nuit est un terrier de lapin où nous entrons, ma main dans sa main en résille. La nuit est une terre noire que je pourrais creuser pour toujours. La nuit est une page de livre que je collais contre mon cœur à seize ans. La nuit est une…