“We would always go to see the body, and my mother would say ‘Ugh, she doesn’t look like herself.’”

There was a lot of dancing to get through that time. I was thinking about this last night… Why do all this if you can’t go sing and dance with your friends?”

“Anxiety, I think, is ecstatic. Being pushed to the limit. There have been times when I know my body can’t go anymore— and yet it is?”

“There was no other place I could go for healing or the sort of answers I was looking for than my first home.”

“I didn’t want to speak in a way that was operatic, I wanted to have a conversation. I wanted to talk instead of sing.”

“I had no conception of what a life after 30 could look like because I’d never imagined it. I’d always existed with the fear that I would die before then. “

“It felt like being on a space shuttle or being at sea. I’ve never been in a space in the hospital that felt so cordoned from the usual power currents in the hospital. It really felt like a space in which we were learning together on a new shore.”

“I can see her sometimes in the mirror and it's really stunning. Sometimes I'm grateful for it, but other time I also think, Well where am I at actually, and what part of this body is me anymore?”

“I literally feel like I have one month left of my life, though I know that’s not true. It’s incredibly morbid, to be honest.”

“That was the moment. I didn’t know what art was, I didn’t know what poetry was, but I knew that I had to find a way to hide from the life I was given and enter a different world.”

“I’ve always been a creature of the past. I’ve always felt flooded and hounded and haunted by memory, but I found that it’s almost like present experience quieting down has left this room.”

“I had to pass the book like a kidney stone. I had to get it out of my system.”

“That was probably the first time I said I’m not sure I have control over this or I’m not really sure that what I do is going to be able to fix this. I don’t know.”

“My father was fighting death with everything he had. There was no peace. He was furious. My son was ready to do everything, talk and communicate and move. His body wasn’t always up to his desires.”

“I was always aware that I could get in trouble, quote unquote, but I wasn’t ever treated like that until this police riot.”

“I remember this because my son fell asleep in the back of the car, and when he fell asleep, my husband said, Listen, I have to tell you. On the train, I had a really bad conversation with my folks.”