"Each time I told my story, I Nawawala a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that araw that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a bulaklak or like the sun; it cannot be contained."
*~*
"How to Commit the Perfect Murder" was an old game in heaven.I always chose the icicle:the weapon melts away."
*~*
"These were the lovely Buto that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the Buto of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life. "
*~*
"This is just a temporary hell, not a permanent one"
*~*
"My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered."
*~*
"The stains could be seen only in the sunlight, so Ruth was never really aware of them until later, when she would stop at n outdoor cafe for a cup of coffee, and look down at her palda and see the dark traces of spilled bodka or whiskey. The alcohol had the effect of making the black cloth blacker. This amused her; she had noted in her journal: "booze affects material as it does people."
*~*
"Sometimes you cry, Susie, even when someone you pag-ibig has been gone a long time. "
*~*
"I had rescued the moment sa pamamagitan ng using my camera and in that way had found how to stop time and hold it. No one could take that image away from me because I owned it."
*~*
"The dead are never exactly seen sa pamamagitan ng the living, but many people seem acutely aware of something changed around them. They speak of a chill in the air. The mates of the deceased wake from dreams and see a figure standing at the end of thier bed, or in a doorway, or boarding, phantomlike, a city bus."
*~*
"Last night it had been my father who had finally sinabi it: "She’s never coming home." A clear and easy piece of truth that everyone who had ever known me had accepted. But he needed to say it, and she needed to hear him say it."
*~*
"Years passed. The trees in our yard grew taller. I watched my family and my mga kaibigan and neighbors, the teachers whom I'd had or imaged having, the high school I had dreamed about. As I sat in the gazebo I would pretend instead that I was sitting on the topmost branch of the punungkahoy ng mepl under which my brother had swallowed a stick and still played hide-and-seek with Nate, or I would dumapo on the railing of a stairwell in New York and wait for Ruth to pass near. I would study with Ray. Drive the Pacific Coast Highway on a warm afternoon of salty air with my mother. But I would end each araw with my father in his den.
I would lay these photographs down in my mind, those gathered from my constant watching, and I could trace how one thing- my death- connected these larawan to a single source. No one could have predicted how my loss would change small moments on Earth. But I held on to those moments, hoarded them. None of them were Nawawala as long as I was there."
*~*
"At fourteen, my sister sailed away from me into a place I’d never
been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls
of hers there were windows."
*~*
"She liked to imagine that when she passed the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was."
*~*
"But also I wanted him to go away and leave me be. I was granted one weak grace. Back in the room where the green chair was still warm from his body, I blew that lonely, flickering candle out"
*~*
"The shadow of years was not as big on his small body. He knew I was asay, but when people left they always came back."
*~*
"At nearly two months,the idea of it as news was fading in the hearts of all but my family-and Ruth"
*~*
"Before, they had never found themselves broken together. Usually, it was one needing the other but not both needing each other, and so there had been a way, sa pamamagitan ng touching, to borrow from the stronger one's strength."
*~*
"I was in the air around him. I was in the cold mornings he had now. I was in the quiet time he spent alone. I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow to set me free."
*~*
*~*
"How to Commit the Perfect Murder" was an old game in heaven.I always chose the icicle:the weapon melts away."
*~*
"These were the lovely Buto that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the Buto of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life. "
*~*
"This is just a temporary hell, not a permanent one"
*~*
"My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered."
*~*
"The stains could be seen only in the sunlight, so Ruth was never really aware of them until later, when she would stop at n outdoor cafe for a cup of coffee, and look down at her palda and see the dark traces of spilled bodka or whiskey. The alcohol had the effect of making the black cloth blacker. This amused her; she had noted in her journal: "booze affects material as it does people."
*~*
"Sometimes you cry, Susie, even when someone you pag-ibig has been gone a long time. "
*~*
"I had rescued the moment sa pamamagitan ng using my camera and in that way had found how to stop time and hold it. No one could take that image away from me because I owned it."
*~*
"The dead are never exactly seen sa pamamagitan ng the living, but many people seem acutely aware of something changed around them. They speak of a chill in the air. The mates of the deceased wake from dreams and see a figure standing at the end of thier bed, or in a doorway, or boarding, phantomlike, a city bus."
*~*
"Last night it had been my father who had finally sinabi it: "She’s never coming home." A clear and easy piece of truth that everyone who had ever known me had accepted. But he needed to say it, and she needed to hear him say it."
*~*
"Years passed. The trees in our yard grew taller. I watched my family and my mga kaibigan and neighbors, the teachers whom I'd had or imaged having, the high school I had dreamed about. As I sat in the gazebo I would pretend instead that I was sitting on the topmost branch of the punungkahoy ng mepl under which my brother had swallowed a stick and still played hide-and-seek with Nate, or I would dumapo on the railing of a stairwell in New York and wait for Ruth to pass near. I would study with Ray. Drive the Pacific Coast Highway on a warm afternoon of salty air with my mother. But I would end each araw with my father in his den.
I would lay these photographs down in my mind, those gathered from my constant watching, and I could trace how one thing- my death- connected these larawan to a single source. No one could have predicted how my loss would change small moments on Earth. But I held on to those moments, hoarded them. None of them were Nawawala as long as I was there."
*~*
"At fourteen, my sister sailed away from me into a place I’d never
been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls
of hers there were windows."
*~*
"She liked to imagine that when she passed the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was."
*~*
"But also I wanted him to go away and leave me be. I was granted one weak grace. Back in the room where the green chair was still warm from his body, I blew that lonely, flickering candle out"
*~*
"The shadow of years was not as big on his small body. He knew I was asay, but when people left they always came back."
*~*
"At nearly two months,the idea of it as news was fading in the hearts of all but my family-and Ruth"
*~*
"Before, they had never found themselves broken together. Usually, it was one needing the other but not both needing each other, and so there had been a way, sa pamamagitan ng touching, to borrow from the stronger one's strength."
*~*
"I was in the air around him. I was in the cold mornings he had now. I was in the quiet time he spent alone. I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow to set me free."
*~*
