Jonny Appleseed

... humility is just a humiliation you loved so much it transformed.

...leaving home always hurts--home isn't a space, it's a feeling. You have to feel home and to feel it, you have to sense it: smell it, taste it, hear it. And it isn't always comfortable--

My home is full of hope and ghosts.

I didn't have the heart to tell him everything, didn't have the courage to say, man, feeling like that's going to break you if you ain't careful. "It's my first time, y'know," he said, as if I didn't know. "I hope I didn't do anything wrong. Did I make any mistakes?" "Mistakes?" I tried hard not to laugh. "Well, let's see, your first mistake was asking that." Then I put my hands on his shoulders and pressed my forehead against his. "And your second one was you thinking you ever owed me a goddamn thing.

The nurses were busybodies, I could hear them scurrying about in the rooms adjacent to ours. They were telling jokes and laughing. Their happiness pissed me off. Stop fucking laughing, I thought, my kokum's lying here dead...She wrote up a report and closed my kokum's eyes, then walked out of the room and summoned a doctor. In the room beside us, another nurse was still laughing. Sometimes I don't like how life goes on. And sometimes I don't think it should.

I am my own best medicine.

Maybe we're more like dandelions. A weed that's a pest in the yard but pretty to look at. Yeah, an Indian home is like a dandelion, pretty, but disposable and imbued with a million little seeds that dissolve into wishes for little white hands that pluck. My home is full of hope and ghosts.

Funny how an NDN "love you" sounds more like, "I'm in pain with you.

Finishing a seven-hour wank session, feeling exhausted, overworked, burnt out, underpaid, sad, hungry, lonely, nostalgic, and strangely beautiful during a one a.m. Sev-run.

And I thought about now, thought about my mom’s advice: if I want to survive, I’d have to leave. But it’s hard, you know? Each second I’m away from home is time that’s gone forever, driving us that much closer to the end. How much more time do we really have? And by whose measure? Like she said, maybe there aren’t that many more moments to come. But at least there was this one.

These days I find myself far too often talking with myself. The wind ruffles my hair; I hold my palms out to the darkness and wait for someone to take me.

...I think of those rapids. I think of how they split rocks and dissolved them into sand; I think of how water crafted this whole damn planet, carved it into animals.

In the digital universe, a punctuated sentence is as powerful a slap as slamming down the landline.

I just laughed. I think he got mad. I wish he knew that when an Indian laughs it's because they're applying a fresh layer of medicine on an open wound.

Then again, I need a lot too. There are tons of unfuckable holes in me that need to be filled.

the fall left me with a dent in my clavicle, wide enough to contain both of those women's many tears.

And I thought about now, thought about my mom's advice: If I wanted to survive, I'd have to leave. But it's hard, you know? Each second I'm away from home is time that's gone forever, driving us that much closer to the end.

When you really let yourself feel, well, you end up scaring yourself from all the hurt and pain.

There are only a few sounds that always hurt me and one of them is the sound of my mom crying.

There are times when you have to scare yourself to find yourself.

Nobody prepares you for the sting when you're about to leave home. All my life I wanted to leave the rez - and every time I was about to, I stopped myself. It hurts. Leaving hurts.

we all got thick skin, but we still gotta let people in.