Into the Water

Beware a calm surface—you never know what lies beneath.

Yes, it is. It’s, like, when someone has an affair, why does the wife always hate the other woman? Why doesn’t she hate her husband? He’s the one who’s betrayed her, he’s the one who swore to love her and keep her and whatever forever and ever. Why isn’t he the one who gets shoved off a fucking cliff?

The things I want to remember I can't, and the things I try so hard to forget just keep coming.

No one liked to think about the fact that the water in that river was infected with the blood and bile of persecuted women, unhappy women; they drank it every day.

She felt it when she woke, not a presence but an absence.

She had never realized before her life was torn apart how awkward grief was, how inconvenient for everyone with whom the mourner came into contact. At first it was acknowledged and respected and deferred to. But after a while it got in the way—of conversation, of laughter, of normal life.

Imagine walking past the place where you lost someone, every single day.

Anything was possible. When you hear hooves you look for horses, but you can’t discount zebras.

But then I suppose I’ve never really lost anyone. How would I know what that kind of grief feels like?

Lena's voice grew cold. "I don't understand you. I don't understand people like you, who always choose to blame the woman. If there's two people doing something wrong and one of them's a girl, it's got to be her fault, right?

The river can go back over the past and bring it all up and spit it out on the banks in full view of everyone, but people can’t.

Watching someone in the throes of raw grief is a terrible thing; the act of watching feels violent, intrusive, a violation. Yet we do it, we have to do it, all the time; you just have to learn to cope with it whatever way you can.

Beckford is not a suicide spot. Beckford is a place to get rid of troublesome women.

You stung me like that often; cruelty always was your strong suit.

they never saw what the water really was, greenish-black and filled with living things and dying things. Out

She used to think that only parents can understand the sort of love that swallows you up, but now she wondered whether it was only mothers who did.

We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.

We tell our stories differently, don't we, you and I?

the horrors conjured up by the mind are always so much worse than what is.

Some say the women left something of themselves in the water; some say it retains some of their power, for ever since then it has drawn to its shores the unlucky, the desperate, the unhappy, the lost. They come here to swim with their sisters.

You were never the princess, you were never the passive beauty waiting for a prince, you were something else. You sided with darkness, with the wicked stepmother, the bad fairy, the witch.

In between them stood an elephant and she felt she ought to point it out.

...the past shooting out at me like sparrows for the hedgerow, startling and inescapable.

All this guilt, this doubt, it was corrosive. It was changing her, twisting her. She was not the woman she used to be. She could feel herself slipping, slithering as though she were shedding a skin, and she didn’t like the rawness underneath, she didn’t like the smell of it. It made her feel vulnerable, it made her feel afraid.

We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection. —Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations

As histórias dos adultos eram cheias de crueldades idiotas: criancinhas impedidas de entrar na escola porque tinham a cor de pele errada, gente surrada ou morta por adorar o deus errado.

There are people who are drawn to water, who retain some vestigial primal sense of where it flows. I believe that I am one of them. I am most alive when I am near the water, when I am near this water. This is the place where I learned to swim, the place where I learned to inhabit nature and my body in the most joyous and pleasurable way.

But the thing people don’t seem to realize is that I don’t want to not feel like this. How can I not feel like this? My sadness feels right. It … weighs the right amount, crushes me just enough.

¿Cómo es que puedo recordar con semejante perfección las cosas que me sucedieron cuando tenía ocho años y, en cambio, me resulta imposible recordar si he hablado o no con mis colegas sobre el cambio de fecha de la evaluación de un cliente? Las cosas que quiero recordar se me olvidan, y las que intento olvidar no dejan de acudir a mi mente.

I was running along the coastal path, clasping Mum's bracelet to my wrist. I was terrified that it was going to drop off and go sliding down the cliff into the sea. I wanted to put it in my mouth for safekeeping, like crocodiles do with their babies.