Lily King

? I didn’t want anything to do with women or anthropology at that point.

I’m both the sad person and the person wanting to comfort the sad person. And then I feel sad for that person who has so much compassion because she’s clearly been through the same thing, too. And the cycle keeps repeating. It’s like when you go into a dressing room with a three-paneled mirror and you line them up just right to see the long narrowing hallway of yourselves diminishing into infinity. It feels like that, like I’m sad for an infinite number of my selves.

I’m both the sad person and the person wanting to comfort the sad person. And then I feel sad for that person who has so much compassion because she’s clearly been through the same thing, too. And the cycle keeps repeating. It’s like when you go into a dressing room with a three-paneled mirror and you line them up just right to see the long narrowing hallway of yourselves diminishing into infinity. It feels like that, like I’m sad for an infinite number of my selves.

Like many parents, my father wanted to give me what he didn’t get, then he wanted me to get what he couldn’t reach.

And yet now I can’t remember what we said to each other.

I look back on those days and it feels gluttonous, all that time and love and life ahead, no bees in my body and my mother on the other end of the line

I’m both the sad person and the person wanting to comfort the sad person.

It was strong, whatever was between us, thick, like the wet air and the smell of every green thing ready to bloom. Maybe it was just spring

I knew that I would remember them and their child and their bright-red house and their boxes of bees and that they wouldn’t recall anything of me.

It’s a particular kind of pleasure, of intimacy, loving a book with someone