Mayra

My problem is that if I can’t be perfect, I hardly think I should exist at all.

We’re kidding ourselves when we claim to know our type. Attraction is the sum of so many messy variables. The time of day, a slant of light, a mood brought on by good or bad news can combine to make anyone irresistible.

People only get less strange as they grow up and life comes down like a hammer to bend them into shape.

The old you, the version that’s tucked inside you now, along with all the other past Mayras, like little nesting dolls.’' '‘Those aren’t me.’' '‘Sure they are. They’re all you. Right down to you as a baby,’' I said. '‘Well, I’m not a nesting doll. I’m a snake. I shed my skin and I move on.

Note to self: Be bold. Don't live like you lived today because that's not living. Don't let every moment be in hesitation. Don't let life become one long bated breath or you'll regret it.

How many times had I said the wrong thing? And what was the one thing that had finally driven her away?

people belong to the eras in which we meet them.

felt like I was running around a bed with a fitted sheet that was just an inch too short, a finished corner snapping free every time I tucked a new one under.

enraptured. I was barely seventeen, and I hadn’t yet learned that being shocking was not the same as being interesting.

But sometimes it’s hard to realize you’re having a hard time. In the moment you convince yourself you’re fine, and then you look back and realize you were barely staying afloat.

Didn’t we all want attention? Or was the real crime, according to my mother, not wanting attention but actually asking for it?

I often wonder what's wrong with me. Before I was aware of the way anxiety could grip the body and wring it dry of joy, I named my ailment "the balloon". The balloon is the extra organ inside of my chest that inflates of its own accord, plugs up my ears, and suffocates me from within. On bad days, my vision blurs. Nights when it feels like the balloon is swelling and crowding the blood and muscle, I roll onto the floor and do push-ups until it deflates. When that doesn't work, I sleep with the TV set to anything at all. It doesn't matter, so long as it keeps my thoughts from veering inward. Had Mayra ever felt the balloon? Of course she had, I sometimes thought. Other times, I wondered whether she'd run far and fast enough throughout her life that she'd avoided it altogether.

There are things I used to know that I now know I never knew, and now that I know what I know, I know better than to think I know.