Girl in Pieces - Kathleen Glasgow

Quotes

:::Kathleen Glasgow, Girl in Pieces:::

• because while I say sadness what I really mean is black hole inside me filled with nails and rocks and broken glass and the words I don’t have anymore.
• One day a week, on Sundays, no one asks us how we’re feeling and that makes some of us feel lost. Jen S. will say, mockingly, “I am having too many feelings! I need someone to hear my feelings!”
• My body is on fire all the time, burning me away day and night. I have to cut the black heat out. When I clean myself, wash and mend, I feel better. Cooler inside and calm. Like moss feels, when you get far back in the woods.
• I’m so lonely in the world I want to peel all of my flesh off and walk, just bone and gristle, straight into the river, to be swallowed, just like my father.
• whether someone has hurt you or made you feel bad or unworthy or unclean, rather than taking the rational step of realizing that person is an asshole or a psycho and should be shot or strung up and you should stay the fuck away from them, instead we internalize our abuse and begin to blame and punish ourselves and weirdly, once you start cutting or burning or fucking because you feel so shitty and unworthy, your body starts to release this neat-feeling shit called endorphins and you feel so fucking high the world is like cotton candy at the best and most colorful state fair in the world, only bloody and stuffed with infection.
• once you start self-harming, you can never not be a creepy freak, because your whole body is now a scarred and charred battlefield and nobody likes that on a girl, nobody will love that
• Sorrysorrysorrysorrysorrysorrysorrysorry.
  I cut that word out, too, but it keeps growing back, tougher and meaner.
• OUT. GET IT OUT. CUT IT ALL OUT.
• I cut because I can’t deal. It’s as simple as that. The world becomes an ocean, the ocean washes over me, the sound of water is deafening, the water drowns my heart, my panic becomes as large as planets. I need release, I need to hurt myself more than the world can hurt me, and then I can comfort myself.
• More scars, more damage. A vicious circle: more scars = more shame = more pain.
• Because when you’re hurt, and someone loves you, they’re supposed to help you, right? When you’re hurt, and someone loves you, they kiss you tenderly, they hold the bottle to your mouth, they stroke your hair with their fingers, right?
• When I told Casper it felt ugly, do you know what she said? She said, Does IT feel ugly or do YOU feel ugly, Charlie? Because there is a difference, and I want you to think about what that difference might be. It will be integral to your healing.
  They really fucking ask a lot of you in this place.
• So you don’t know what it feels like to every day, every fucking day, be so lonely that this black hole inside is going to swallow you down, until the one day this person, this really beautiful person? comes to your school and she just seems to not care that everyone is staring at her
• I know things are so hard right now, but they’ll get better. Sometimes it takes a while to find that special friend, but you will.
• For years no one had wanted me. For years I’d been pushed around, yelled at, made fun of, and now, now I had two beautiful people who’d picked me. Me.
• Old things, old habits are comfortable, even when we know they’ll cause us pain.
• There is so much broken between us. My eyes blur.
• “Everything and everybody that’s busted can be fixed. That’s what I think.”
• There is being alone, and then there is being alone. They are not the same thing at all.
• I can feel it, finally, after months and months of fighting it, and it’s pulling me deeper into the peacoat, into the futon: sleep.
• “Don’t float,” Casper would tell us when we got stressed, when the pressure in our brains began to fight with the pressure inside our bodies and we’d start to disassociate. “Don’t you dare float. Stay with me.”
• Stop. Assess. Breathe.
• She has the kind of lined face that people call etched. The kind that looks beautiful and intimidating and slightly creepy. I always wonder what these women looked like as children.
• She makes a growling sound. “You girls today. You make me so fucking sad. The world hurts enough. Why fucking chase it down?”
• And now we’re smiling stupidly at each other. Or, Riley’s smiling at me like he might smile at anything with breasts, and I’m the one smiling stupidly because I’m a stupid jackass.
• He winks at me. “That’s how hearts get broken, you know. When you believe in promises.”
• “Boom!” She spreads her fingers. “You keep people inside you, that’s what happens. Memories and regrets swallow you up, they get fat on the very marrow of your soul and then—”
  I look over at her, startled by her strange words. Her face softens as she says, “And then, boom, you explode. Is that how you got those?” She gestures at my arms, safely hidden underneath the hoodie.
  I fix my eyes on my plate. Boom. Yes.
• Always be alert, Evan would warn. The fox has many disguises.
• People aren’t nice, people aren’t nice, you should know that by now.
• NSSI. Non-Suicidal Self-Injury
• “It can be done, Charlie. You see? You can change stuff in your life, if you want to.”