Destroying Myself Slowly Quotes

I like music," she said slowly, "because when I hear it, I . . . I lose myself within myself, if that makes any sense. I become empty and full all at once, and I can feel the whole earth roiling around me. When I play. I'm not . . . for once, I'm not destroying, I'm creating.

Mom." I couldn't believe she was doing this again. She was taking this moment, this time when I was strongest, away from me. "I don't care what I have to do," she said, her voice low and even. "I don't care if I have to send you away or switch schools. I don't care if I have to follow you twenty-four hours a day, you will not see him, Halley. You will not destroy yourself this way." "Why are you just assuming I'm going back to him?" I asked her, just as she was drawing in breath to make another point. "Why don't you ask me what I said to him out there?" She shut her mouth, caught off guard. "What?" "Why don't you ever wait a second and see what I'm planning, or thinking, before you burst in with your opinions and ideas? You never even give me a chance." "Yes, I do," she said indignantly. "No," I said. "You don't. And then you wonder why I never tell you anyone or share anything with you. I can never trust you with anything or share anything with you. I can never trust you with anything, give you any piece of me without you grabbing it to keep for yourself." "That's not true," she said slowly, but it was just now hitting her, I could see it. "Halley, you don't always know what's at stake, and I do." "I will never learn," I said to her slowly, "until you let me." And so we stood there in the kitchen, my mother and I, facing off over everything that had built up since June, when I was willing to hand myself over free and clear. Now I needed her to return it all to me, with the faith that I could make my own way.

I want to fulfill myself in one of the rarest of destinies. I have only a dim notion of what it 
will be. I want it to have not a graceful curve slightly bent toward evening but a hitherto unseen beauty 
lovely because of the danger which works away at it overwhelms it undermines it. Oh let me be only utter
 beauty I shall go quickly or slowly but I shall dare what must be dared. I shall destroy appearances the 
casings will burn away and one evening I shall appear there in the palm of your hand quiet and pure like a
 glass statuette. You will see me. Round about me there will be nothing left.

No,” I hear myself say. “You’re not supposed to be here.” She’s sitting on my bed. She’s leaning back on her elbows, legs outstretched in front of her, crossed at the ankles. And while some part of me understands I must be dreaming, there’s another, overwhelmingly dominant part of me that refuses to accept this. Part of me wants to believe she’s really here, inches away from me, wearing this short, tight black dress that keeps slipping up her thighs. But everything about her looks different, oddly vibrant; the colors are all wrong. Her lips are a richer, deeper shade of pink; her eyes seem wider, darker. She’s wearing shoes I know she’d never wear. And strangest of all: she’s smiling at me. “Hi,” she whispers. It’s just one word, but my heart is already racing. I’m inching away from her, stumbling back and nearly slamming my skull against the headboard, when I realize my shoulder is no longer wounded. I look down at myself. My arms are both fully functional. I’m wearing nothing but a white T-shirt and my underwear. She shifts positions in an instant, propping herself up on her knees before crawling over to me. She climbs onto my lap. She’s now straddling my waist. I’m suddenly breathing too fast. Her lips are at my ear. Her words are so soft. “Kiss me,” she says. “Juliette—” “I came all the way here.” She’s still smiling at me. It’s a rare smile, the kind she’s never honored me with. But somehow, right now, she’s mine. She’s mine and she’s perfect and she wants me, and I’m not going to fight it. I don’t want to. Her hands are tugging at my shirt, pulling it up over my head. Tossing it to the floor. She leans forward and kisses my neck, just once, so slowly. My eyes fall closed. There aren’t enough words in this world to describe what I’m feeling. I feel her hands move down my chest, my stomach; her fingers run along the edge of my underwear. Her hair falls forward, grazing my skin, and I have to clench my fists to keep from pinning her to my bed. Every nerve ending in my body is awake. I’ve never felt so alive or so desperate in my life, and I’m sure if she could hear what I’m thinking right now, she’d run out the door and never come back. Because I want her. Now. Here. Everywhere. I want nothing between us. I want her clothes off and the lights on and I want to study her. I want to unzip her out of this dress and take my time with every inch of her. I can’t help my need to just stare; to know her and her features: the slope of her nose, the curve of her lips, the line of her jaw. I want to run my fingertips across the soft skin of her neck and trace it all the way down. I want to feel the weight of her pressed against me, wrapped around me. I can’t remember a reason why this can’t be right or real. I can’t focus on anything but the fact that she’s sitting on my lap, touching my chest, staring into my eyes like she might really love me. I wonder if I’ve actually died. But just as I lean in, she leans back, grinning before reaching behind her, never once breaking eye contact with me. “Don’t worry,” she whispers. “It’s almost over now.” Her words seem so strange, so familiar. “What do you mean?” “Just a little longer and I’ll leave.” “No.” I’m blinking fast, reaching for her. “No, don’t go—where are you going—” “You’ll be all right,” she says. “I promise.” “No—” But now she’s holding a gun. And pointing it at my heart.

The thing is, work has simply swamped my whole existence. Slowly but surely it's robbed me of my mother, my wife, and everything that meant anything to me. It's like a germ planted in the skull that devours the brain, spreads to the trunk and the limbs, and destroys the entire body in time. No sooner am I out of bed in the morning than work clamps down on me and pins me to my desk before I've even had a breath of fresh air. It follows me to lunch and I find myself chewing over sentences as I'm chewing my food. It goes with me when I go out, eats out of my plate at dinner and shares my pillow in bed at night. It's so extremely merciless that once the process of creation is started, it's impossible for me to stop it, and it goes on growing and working even when I'm asleep. ... Outside that, nothing, nobody exists.

Long black hair and deep clean blue eyes and skin pale white and lips blood red she's small and thin and worn and damaged. She is standing there. What are you doing here? I was taking a walk and I saw you and I followed you. What do you want. I want you to stop. I breathe hard, stare hard, tense and coiled. There is still more tree for me to destroy I want that fucking tree. She smiles and she steps towards me, toward toward toward me, and she opens he r arms and I'm breathing hard staring hard tense and coiled she puts her arms around me with one hand not he back of my head and she pulls me into her arms and she holds me and she speaks. It's okay. I breathe hard, close my eyes, let myself be held. It's okay. Her voice calms me and her arms warm me and her smell lightens me and I can feel her heart beat and my heart slows and I stop shaking an the Fury melts into her safety an she holds me and she says. Okay. Okay. Okay. Something else comes and it makes me feel weak and scared and fragile and I don't want to be hurt and this feeling is the feeling I have when I know I can be hurt and hurt deeper and more terribly than anything physical and I always fight it and control it and stop it but her voice calms me and her arms warm me and her smell lightens me and I can feel her heart beat and if she let me go right now I would fall and the need and confusion and fear and regret and horror and shame and weakness and fragility are exposed to the soft strength of her open arms and her simple word okay and I start to cry. I start to cry. I want to cry. It comes in waves. THe waves roll deep and from deep the deep within me and I hold her and she holds me tighter and i let her and I let it and I let this and I have not felt this way this vulnerability or allowed myself to feel this way this vulnerability since I was ten years old and I don't know why I haven't and I don't know why I am now and I only know that I am and that it is scary terrifying frightening worse and better than anything I've ever felt crying in her arms just crying in her ams just crying. She guides me to the ground, but she doesn't let me go. THe Gates are open and thirteen years of addiction, violence, hell and their accompaniments are manifesting themselves in dense tears and heavy sobs and a shortness of breath and a profound sense of loss. THe loss inhabits, fills and overwhelms me. It is the loss of a childhood of being a Teeenager of normalcy of happiness of love of trust anon reason of God of Family of friends of future of potential of dignity of humanity of sanity f myself of everything everything everything. I lost everything and I am lost reduced to a mass of mourning, sadness, grief, anguish and heartache. I am lost. I have lost. Everything. Everything. It's wet and Lilly cradles me like a broken Child. My face and her shoulder and her shirt and her hair are wet with my tears. I slow down and I start to breathe slowly and deeply and her hair smells clean and I open my eyes because I want to see it an it is all that I can see. It is jet black almost blue and radiant with moisture. I want to touch it and I reach with one of my hands and I run my hand from the crown along her neck and her back to the base of her rib and it is a thin perfect sheer and I let it slowly drop from the tips of my fingers and when it is gone I miss it. I do it again and again and she lets me do it and she doesn't speak she just cradles me because I am broken. I am broken. Broken. THere is noise and voices and Lilly pulls me in tighter and tighter and I know I pull her in tighter and tighter and I can feel her heart beating and I know she can feel my heart beating and they are speaking our hearts are speaking a language wordless old unknowable and true and we're pulling and holding and the noise is closer and the voices louder and Lilly whispers. You're okay. You're okay. You're okay.

I like music,” she said slowly, “because when I hear it, I … I lose myself within myself, if that makes sense. I become empty and full all at once, and I can feel the whole earth roiling around me. When I play, I’m not … for once, I’m not destroying. I’m creating.” She chewed on her lip. “I used to want to be a healer. Back when I was … Back before this became my profession, when I was almost too young to remember, I wanted to be a healer.” She shrugged. “Music reminds me of that feeling.” She laughed under her breath. “I’ve never told anyone that,” she admitted,

I have many questions for you, Harry Potter." "Like what?" Harry spat, fists still clenched. "Well," said Riddle, smiling pleasantly, "how is it that you- a skinny boy with no extraordinary magical talent- managed to defeat the greatest wizard of all time? How did you escape with nothing but a scar, while Lord Voldemort's powers were destroyed?" There was an odd red gleam in his hungry eyes now. "Why do you care how I escaped?" said Harry slowly. "Voldemort was after your time...." "Voldemort," said Riddle softly, "is my past, present, and future, Harry Potter...." He pulled Harry's wand from his pocket and began to trace it through the air, writing three shimmering words: TOM MARVOLO RIDDLE Then he waved the wand once, and the letters of his name rearranged themselves: I AM LORD VOLDEMORT "You see?" he whispered. "It was a name I was already using at Hogwarts, to my most intimate friends only, of course. You think I was going to use my filthy Muggle father's name forever? I, in whose veins runs the blood of Salazar Slytherin himself, through my mother's side? I, keep the name of a foul, common Muggle, who abandoned me even before I was born, just because he found out his wife was a witch? No, Harry- I fashioned myself a new name, a name I knew wizards everywhere would one day fear to speak, when I had become the greatest sorcerer in the world!

It was 1924 and I was at Riverton again. All the doors hung wide open, silk billowing in the summer breeze. An orchestra perched high on the hill beneath the ancient maple, violins lilting lazily in the warmth. The air rang with pealing laughter and crystal, and the sky was the kind of blue we'd all thought the war had destroyed forever. One of the footmen, smart in black and white, poured champagne into the top of a tower of glass flutes and everyone clapped, delighting in the splendid wastage. I saw myself, the way one does in dreams, moving amongst the guests. Moving slowly, much more slowly than one can in life, the others a blur of silk and sequins. I was looking for someone.

Instinctively, my eyes clasped on Amar’s. He was shocked, his face pale. He grabbed me; his hands entangled in my hair even as my fingers were wrapped around the hilt that destroyed him. “I love you, jaani. My soul could never forget you. It would retrace every step until it found you.” He looked at me, his dark eyes dulling, as if all the love that had once lit them to black mirrors was slowly disappearing. “Save me.” The glow of the candles cast pools of light onto the ground, illuminating his profile. I knew, now, why Nritti begged me not to look at him. His gaze unlocked something in me. It was both visceral and ephemeral, like heavy light. The eyes of death revealed every recess of the soul and every locked-away memory of my past and present life converged into one gaze… I was weightless, my vison unfocused and hazy until the memory of the woman in the glass garden engulfed me. Slowly, the woman turned and a wave of shock shot through me--I was staring at myself.

I accumulate rash acts: getting into stolen cars, walking in front of stores where I have operated, showing obviously fake papers. I have the feeling that in a very short time everything is bound to break wide open. My rash acts are serious matters and I know that airy-winged catastrophe will emerge from a very, very slight mistake. 1 But while I hope for misfortune as an act of grace, it is well for me to plunge fully into the usual ways of the world. I want to fulfill myself in one of the rarest of destinies. I have only a dim notion of what it will be. I want it to have not a graceful curve, slightly bent toward evening, but a hitherto unseen beauty, lovely because of the danger which works away at it, overwhelms it, undermines it. Oh let me be only utter beauty! I shall go quickly or slowly, but I shall dare what must be dared. I shall destroy appearances, the casings will burn away and one evening I shall appear there in the palm of your hand, quiet and pure, like a glass statuette. You will see me. Round about me there will be nothing left.

But once the work was done, we sat down in a warm patch of Sunlight outside his house where the peonies were slowly coming into bloom, and the whole world seemed covered in a fine layer of gold leaf. “What have you done in life?” Boros suddenly asked. This question was so unexpected that I instantly let myself be carried away by memories. They began to sail past my eyes, and typically for memories, everything in them seemed better, finer, and happier than in reality. It’s strange, but we didn’t say a word. For people of my age, the places that they truly loved and to which they once belonged are no longer there. The places of their childhood and youth have ceased to exist, the villages where they went on holiday, the parks with uncomfortable benches where their first loves blossomed, the cities, cafés and houses of their past. And if their outer form has been preserved, it’s all the more painful, like a shell with nothing inside it anymore. I have nowhere to return to. It’s like a state of imprisonment. The walls of the cell are the horizon of what I can see. Beyond them exists a world that’s alien to me and doesn’t belong to me. So for people like me the only thing possible is here and now, for every future is doubtful, everything yet to come is barely sketched and uncertain, like a mirage that can be destroyed by the slightest twitch of the air. That’s what was going through my mind as we sat there in silence. It was better than a conversation. I have no idea what either of the men was thinking about. Perhaps about the same thing.

In a hushed voice, Beth said, “I’m nothing but a pile of sand.” I stole another glance at her and tightened my grip on the steering wheel. “What do you mean?” Beth gazed out the passenger window while the sounds of our breaths filled the space between us. “I imagine myself as a sandcastle sometimes. Like, instead of being a pile of sand, I’ve been transformed into this beautiful thing. There I am, out on display for anyone walking by to stop and stare, maybe even admire, with the sun beating down on me, making me feel warm and comforted. And when I’m in that moment, I feel good. Really good.” Beth paused briefly, licked her lips, and continued to fidget with her hands. “Then the sun begins to set, casting shadows on me. People leave and the darkness creeps in, wrapping me in the feeling of nothingness. I feel the tide inching closer and closer seeking to destroy me. Little by little the waves begin to lap at my castle walls, taunting me as they slowly consume me. When the tide comes in, it washes away everything I had become until I’m right back where I started… a pile of sand.

In a hushed voice, Beth said, “I’m nothing but a pile of sand.” I stole another glance at her and tightened my grip on the steering wheel. “What do you mean?” Beth gazed out the passenger window while the sounds of our breaths filled the space between us. “I imagine myself as a sandcastle sometimes. Like, instead of being a pile of sand, I’ve been transformed into this beautiful thing. There I am, out on display for anyone walking by to stop and stare, maybe even admire, with the sun beating down on me, making me feel warm and comforted. And when I’m in that moment, I feel good. Really good.” Beth paused briefly, licked her lips, and continued to fidget with her hands. “Then the sun begins to set, casting shadows on me. People leave and the darkness creeps in, wrapping me in the feeling of nothingness. I feel the tide inching closer and closer seeking to destroy me. Little by little the waves begin to lap at my castle walls, taunting me as they slowly consume me. When the tide comes in, it washes away everything I had become until I’m right back where I started… a pile of sand.

Me: (lamentandosi) So what have I learned or discovered in all these years, considering all the sacrifices, and think about the effort I’ve gone to! Malina: Nothing of course. You learned what was already inside you, what you already knew. Isn’t that enough? Me: Maybe you’re right. I sometimes think now that I’m recovering myself, the way I used to be. I’m all too glad to think about the time when I had everything, when my cheerfulness was truly full of cheer, when I was serious in every good sense of the word. (quasi glissando) Then everything became worse for the wear, damaged, used and used up and ultimately destroyed. (moderator) I slowly improved myself, more and more I made up for what was missing, and I consider myself healed. So no I’m almost like I used to be. (Sotto voce) But what purpose did the journey serve?

The obstacles society puts in his path decrease only marginally, and that in no small part due to his own efforts. But after the transition point of Memory, Miles begins to nurture his mental and emotional health, to harness his manias to a productivity that is not self-consuming, and to find tools to light the way out of depressions. This development is highlighted in the later novel A Civil Campaign: Miles does not cease making bad decisions, but he has learned how to prevent some and identify others much more quickly and has developed tools for recovering from mistakes. For me, this is a healthy vision of life with a disability. It is not a slow freeze or a self-immolation, but a balance of self and selves. I’ve often struggled with seeing myself as a fractured broken assemblage, but I have been slowly discovering that the secret is not to snuff out these selves. There is no me that is free of myself. The challenge is to find that central self and nurture it; to use its strengths to temper other states and selves. Making decisions is still hard, but Miles finds, if not a map, then at least a light in the darkness.

So she is tearing us apart, dictating the rest of my life and we have to go along with it or she will destroy Hytanica?” “Yes. And we’re running out of time.” He shook his head in awe. “I have to hand it to her, Alera. She’s ruthless in pursuing what she wants.” “This is serious, Narian.” I found his attitude almost irritating. He obviously understaood the direness of his situation, yet was acting like it was only a game. “I know it’s serious, but there is only one choice as far as I’m concerned. I don’t want to live without you, Alera. I won’t live without you.” I sat up and searched the depths of his blue eyes. “What do you mean?” He leaned forward and kissed me tenderly, and my pulse raced. Then I put my hands on his chest and pushed myself away. “Tell me, Narian.” “All right. There are three things I believe with all my heart. Hytanica can withstand a Cokyrian assault. I can no longer let Nantilam control my life and I will die before I let you go.” His eyes met mine and he unlaced my blouse, slowly pushing it off my shoulders. This time I did not resist him. “What I want,” he softly finished, “is to spend these last hours holding the woman I love, the woman to whom I am bound.” “But how are you feeling?” “Trust me, Alera, I’m not feeling any pain right now.” Tears trickled from the corners of my eyes as I opened his shirt and ran my fingers over the muscles of his chest. He stood, leading me to the rug in front of the hearth, where he drew me down to kneel beside him. His touch was warm, gentle, as he almost reverently removed my clothing, then he stripped off his shirt and breeches, his skin and his golden hair glistening in the light cast by the fire. As my pulse and breathing quickened, he caressed me, first with his eyes, then with his hands and mouth. “I love you, Alera,” he whispered against my skin, and I gave in to him completely, sinking into the feelings he stirred in me, knowing I stirred the same feelings in him. In all my dreams of what this moment would be like, I had never imagined the soaring bliss that came from giving yourself to another person with reservation, without fear, without pressure. A person you loved and trusted with all your heart and who returned those feelings a hundredfold.

I like music,” she said slowly, “because when I hear it, I… I lose myself within myself, if that makes sense. I become empty and full all at once, and I can feel the whole earth roiling around me. When I play, I’m not… for once, I’m destroying. I’m creating. I used to want to be a healer. Back when I was… Back before this became my profession, when I was almost too young to remember, I wanted to be a healer. Music reminds me of that feeling.” She laughed under her breath. “I’ve never told anyone that,” she admitted, then saw his smile. “Don’t mock me.” “I’m not mocking you—I’m just…” “Unused to hearing people speak from the heart?” “Well, yes.

His knee presses between my thighs and he nudges, spreading my legs open as his hips pin me to the wall. “Next time this happens,” he says, drifting the gun down my cheek, then down my neck. The barrel trails down my abdomen until he lowers it to the place my thighs meet, his dark eyes focused on mine. “I’ll give you a proper reason to cry.” He rubs the gun between my legs, slowly sliding the length of it along the entirety of my tingling center, the cold metal a stark contrast to the heat building there. My lashes flutter before I close my eyes tightly, trying to ward off the sensation I’m reluctantly savoring. Aero’s presence does something different to me. He pushes me to feel things I’ve denied myself to save my soul. What I can’t decide is if falling into his darkness will set me free or destroy me entirely.

I like music," she said slowly, "because when i hear it, I... I lose myself within myself, if that makes sense. I become empty and full all at once, and i can feel the whole earth roiling around me. When i play, i'm not... for once, i'm not destroying. I'm creating.

I like music,’ she said slowly, ‘because when I hear it, I . . . I lose myself within myself, if that makes any sense. I become empty and full all at once, and I can feel the whole earth roiling around me. When I play, I’m not . . . for once, I’m not destroying. I’m creating.

I like music,” she said slowly, “because when I hear it, I … I lose myself within myself, if that makes sense. I become empty and full all at once, and I can feel the whole earth roiling around me. When I play, I’m not … for once, I’m not destroying. I’m creating.

It’s important for me to link my critique of the attention economy to the promise of bioregional awareness because I believe that capitalism, colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all coproduce one another. It’s also important because of the parallels between what the economy does to an ecological system and what the attention economy does to our attention. In both cases, there’s a tendency toward an aggressive monoculture, where those components that are seen as “not useful” and which cannot be appropriated (by loggers or by Facebook) are the first to go. Because it proceeds from a false understanding of life as atomized and optimizable, this view of usefulness fails to recognize the ecosystem as a living whole that in fact needs all of its parts to function. Just as practices like logging and large-scale farming decimate the land, an overemphasis on performance turns what was once a dense and thriving landscape of individual and communal thought into a Monsanto farm whose “production” slowly destroys the soil until nothing more can grow. As it extinguishes one species of thought after another, it hastens the erosion of attention. Why is it that the modern idea of productivity is so often a frame for what is actually the destruction of the natural productivity of an ecosystem? This sounds a lot like the paradox in Zhuang Zhou’s story, which more than anything is a joke about how narrow the concept of “usefulness” is. When the tree appears to the carpenter in his dream, it’s essentially asking him: Useful for what? Indeed, this is the same question I have when I give myself enough time to step back from the capitalist logic of how we currently understand productivity and success. Productivity that produces what? Successful in what way, and for whom? The happiest, most fulfilled moments of my life have been when I was completely aware of being alive, with all the hope, pain, and sorrow that that entails for any mortal being. In those moments, the idea of success as a teleological goal would have made no sense; the moments were ends in themselves, not steps on a ladder. I think people in Zhuang Zhou’s time knew the same feeling.

You asked who we are now,” I said, looking up at him. “I think we need to move even further back and ask, are we a ‘we’?” “What do you mean?” he asked, with sudden intensity. “What I mean is,” I said, “are we together, or am I just some kind of…warden again, only it’s fate keeping you prisoner this time, instead of my brother?” “Don’t make it sound simple when it isn’t,” he said. “That’s not fair.” “Fair?” I laughed. “What, in your entire life so far, has made you think anything will be ‘fair’?” I stepped wider, so I felt like I was rooted to the ground, the way I might have if we had been about to spar. “Just tell me--tell me if I’m something you’re choosing, or not. Just tell me.” Just get it over with, I thought, because I already knew the answer. I was ready to hear it--even eager, because I had been bracing myself since our first kiss for this rejection. It was the inevitable by-product of what I was. Monstrous, and bound to destroy whoever was in my path, particularly if they were as kind as Akos. “I,” he said, slowly, “am a Thuvhesit, Cyra. I would never oppose my country, my home, if I felt like I had a choice.” I closed my eyes. It hurt worse--much worse--than I was expecting it to. He went on, “But my mother used to say, ‘Suffer the fate, for all else is delusion.’ There’s no point in fighting something that is inevitable.

COVID-19 outbreak made them a norm of public life. Many also wore helmets and carried melee weapons. Together, the crowd of around four hundred brought traffic to a standstill—by now a regular occurrence in the City of Roses, as Portland is known by. As usual, the police stayed away. They knew whom the streets belonged to. Working as a journalist with a phone and a new GoPro camera, I slowly made my way toward the front of the crowd. Some of the protesters recognized me. They glared and whispered in the ears of their comrades. Luis Enrique Marquez looked right at me. The 48-year-old Rose City Antifa member has been arrested so many times at violent protests in Portland over the past few years that he no longer bothers to wear a mask. Still, I ignored the stares and continued forward. By this point, the crowd’s chants had changed. “No hate! No fear!” they began shouting. Before I made it much farther, someone—or something—hit me hard in the back of the head. I was nearly knocked to the ground from the impact. Never having been in a fight, I naively asked myself in the moment: “Did someone just trip and fall into me?” Before I could turn around to look, a sea of bodies dressed in black surrounded me. In the background, I could still hear the crowd chant, “No hate!” Ironically, all I saw next—and felt—was the pure embodiment of hatred. Staring at an amorphous mob of faceless shadows, I froze. Suddenly, clenched fists repeatedly struck my face and head from all directions. My right knee buckled from the impact. The masked attackers wore tactical gloves—gloves hardened with fiberglass on the knuckles. It’s likely some of them used brass knuckles as well. I put my arms up to surrender, but this only signaled to them to beat me more ferociously. Someone then snatched my camera—my evidence. I desperately tried but failed to hold on to it. The masked thief melted into the crowd, a function of the “black bloc.” Another person ran up and kicked me twice in the groin. Someone bashed me on the head from behind with a stiff placard or sign.

In her later e-mails to me, Nancy struggled to capture the existential reality of trauma. “I want to tell you what a flashback is like. It is as if time is folded or warped, so that the past and present merge, as if I were physically transported into the past. Symbols related to the original trauma, however benign in reality, are thoroughly contaminated and so become objects to be hated, feared, destroyed if possible, avoided if not. For example, an iron in any form—a toy, a clothes iron, a curling iron, came to be seen as an instrument of torture. Each encounter with a scrub suit left me disassociated, confused, physically ill and at times consciously angry. “My marriage is slowly falling apart—my husband came to represent the heartless laughing people [the surgical team] who hurt me. I exist in a dual state. A pervasive numbness covers me with a blanket; and yet the touch of a small child pulls me back to the world. For a moment, I am present and a part of life, not just an observer. “Interestingly, I function very well at work, and I am constantly given positive feedback. Life proceeds with its own sense of falsity. “There is a strangeness, bizarreness to this dual existence. I tire of it. Yet I cannot give up on life, and I cannot delude myself into believing that if I ignore the beast it will go away. I’ve thought many times that I had recalled all the events around the surgery, only to find a new one. “There are so many pieces of that 45 minutes of my life that remain unknown. My memories are still incomplete and fragmented, but I no longer think that I need to know everything in order to understand what happened. “When the fear subsides I realize I can handle it, but a part of me doubts that I can. The pull to the past is strong; it is the dark side of my life; and I must dwell there from time to time. The struggle may also be a way to know that I survive—a re-playing of the fight to survive—which apparently I won, but cannot own.

table. “I like music,” she said slowly, “because when I hear it, I … I lose myself within myself, if that makes sense. I become empty and full all at once, and I can feel the whole earth roiling around me. When I play, I’m not … for once, I’m not destroying. I’m creating.” She chewed on her lip. “I used to want to be a healer. Back when I was … Back before this became my profession, when I was almost too young to remember, I wanted to be a healer.” She shrugged. “Music reminds me of that feeling.” She laughed under her breath. “I’ve never told anyone that,” she admitted, then saw his smile. “Don’t mock me.