The Paisley Pony
I had a very epic and full-blown college experience. I am so fulfilled.
May 2012
“When I die, lava will flow and preserve me whole
for 50,000 years. I’ll be exhibited in a great museum,
next to the whale bones and amethyst geodes.
You’ll be pinned with the butterflies,
handled with gloves, exquisitely fragile.
Isn’t it funny they’ll never connect us?
This rock woman with that paper man?
They were never in love.
She would have pounded him into dust.
He’d have been crushed by a woman like that.” —Kathleen Flenniken, Natural History
for 50,000 years. I’ll be exhibited in a great museum,
next to the whale bones and amethyst geodes.
You’ll be pinned with the butterflies,
handled with gloves, exquisitely fragile.
Isn’t it funny they’ll never connect us?
This rock woman with that paper man?
They were never in love.
She would have pounded him into dust.
He’d have been crushed by a woman like that.” —Kathleen Flenniken, Natural History
“*I would hereby like to offer Adam and all other shirtless bohunks a recommended reading list, free of charge: James Salter’s A Sport and A Pastime, for sex tips, Lorrie Moore’s Self Help, for an earlier view into young women’s pathology, maybe some Tom Perrotta for a humorous and dark view of life outside the big city, maybe some Cormac McCarthy for the blood and guts. And everyone, everyone, everyone should be required to read at least one Jane Austen novel, to know how things are supposed to end, even if they rarely do in real life.”
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“Eventually someone is going to break your heart. Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking “I am falling to the floor crying” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it—you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well and when you’re having sex with your next lover on this very floor they will also notice that you didn’t paint it very well and they will think less of you for it. And then you think “Is that sentence too long?” And then you have to hold the contradictions of sobbing uncontrollably and wondering about grammar in your head at the same time.”
—Richard Siken
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I’ve been rereading your story. I think it’s about me in a way that might not be flattering, but that’s okay.
“since love is a fragile truce hovering bewtween self-rescue and self-obliteration”
—
“You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place. Like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.”
—Azar Nafisi
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