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book quote purgatory cr:

[judeverse]

I was starting to feel as though my entire existence was a threat. Perhaps this was what womanhood was. The dangerous knowledge of who you are and what you could do with that power if pushed.

[judeverse]

Everything seemed so much more finite when you were mortal. Everything ached more, hurt more. If you are doomed from the start, you learn to savour every drop of life in ways immortals never can.

[judeverse]

So this was how they measured their lives, in the span of sunrises and moonsets.

There were tales of parents who lost their children, and lovers who lost each other.

But a thread ran through all, and that thread was named love. When asked if they would

ever want to live again they all said they would if only to know love once more.

[judeverse]

Now, when I looked into my eyes, I saw the violet shades of my mother’s. In fact, I was starting to resemble her more and more as time went on, but the more I resembled her, the shifting sands of time took my father from my features. Is that all ageing is? Leaving things you knew and once loved behind to become something brand new?

[judeverse]

When a child is raised between bones and ghosts, they learn about death faster than they learn about growing up.

[judeverse]

But grief was a cruel, selfish thing. It wounded the one who carried it so deeply, that when others saw them, they only saw the wound. And that was all I was now. A wound. A motherless thing. A child grieving without even knowing what grief was.

[judeverse]

'We do not die, child. She is not dead, not the way you are thinking.

Instead, you must picture her alive, just in a different form. Here, and not here.

We do not have to have these bodies to continue to exist.'

[judeverse]

Even here, in the kingdom of death itself, dying as an immortal felt like an impossibility. My only experience with death was the stories my mother gave me. She told me tales about how mortals are doomed, so everything is more beautiful to them yet more cruel because they live such short lives. She told me about the villages not far from us where once people died, their bodies would rot if not set aflame, but I had never seen decay until I saw the bones and skeletons of the Underworld. When a mortal died, prayers were riven for their safe passage, a feast in their name. And yet, although my mother was a Goddess, a guide to stars and maker of prophecies, the creator of dreams, there was no one to attend her last rites, speak kindly of who she was. She left her immortal Goddess body to become an island, a death in every way that counted to the divine, completely alone.

[judeverse]

Hungry children eat anything you give them. An ounce of kindness. The most broken love. Even a crumb is enough when you are hungry. You take what is given and say thank you.

[judeverse]

I’ve only ever known myself in song, between notes, in that place where language won’t suffice but the drums might, might speak for us, might speak for what is on our hearts.

[judeverse]

I didn’t tell her that I liked it: I was drawn to its symmetry and the way it marked me out as someone who didn’t die when they were supposed to. It was like the tattoos of an Amazon warrior, the mark of the victor. But I was alone in perceiving it that way. Only when the stitches were gone did everyone stop behaving as though I were a breakable object. I saw myself as bronze while my family viewed me as a delicate piece of terracotta which had already broken once and been carefully glued back together. It was hard to feel like myself again until everyone stopped treating me like someone else.

[judeverse]

He liked to say that he planned to hold on till I became queen, and then he’d die happy. I would laugh, knowing this was a promise to live forever: as the poets would sing of me, I am the youngest of four siblings, cursed daughter of cursed parents. My brothers will marry because they are kings. My sister will surely marry Haem. But I cannot expect such a future for myself, and Thebes will never want me as her queen.

[judeverse]

He understood when you have grown up as I have, there is no security in not knowing things, in avoiding the ugliest truths because they can’t be faced. There is only an oppressive, creeping dread that the thing no one has told you is too terrible to imagine, and that it will haunt the rest of your life when you find out. Because that is what happened the last time, and that is why my siblings and I have grown up in a cursed house, children of cursed parents.

[judeverse]

It is the wrong season to have a crush. Meeting someone in a summer’s evening is like giving a dead flame new life. You are more likely to wander outside with this person for a reprieve from whatever sweatbox you are being housed in. You might find yourself accepting the offer of a cigarette, your eyes narrowing as the nicotine tickles your brain and you exhale into the stiff heat of a London night. You might look towards the sky and realize the blue doesn’t quite deepen during these months. In winter, you are content to scoop your ashes away and head home.

[judeverse]

She smiles, and it’s compelling in the same way the sun is to a planet in orbit, all-encompassing. I couldn’t turn away from her even if I wanted to. She waited for me.

[judeverse]

But I couldn’t quite make the words fit me. Not the way they fit other people. Bisexual. Queer. Everyone else seemed to wear them like leggings.

Would saying it out loud make it feel true?

It was kind of like shopping for clothing online. You pay for your labels upfront and hope that they fit when they get there.

[judeverse]

The kind of desert that is located in that corner of Colorado is a hard one. It is not the painted rocks and elegant cactus pillars one finds farther southwest, nor is it the secretive pine-furred mountains and valleys of the rest of Colorado. It is barren scrub and yellow dust, and blue-tinged, sharp-teethed mountains in the distance that want to have nothing to do with you.