Ling Ma Severance Quotes

The past is a black hole, cut into the present day like a wound, and if you come too close, you can get sucked in. You have to keep moving.

The first place you live alone, away from your family, he said, is the first place you become a person, the first place you become yourself.

A second chance doesn't mean you're in the clear. In many ways, it is the more difficult thing. Because a second chance means that you have to try harder. You must rise to the challenge without the blind optimism of ignorance.

It was the anonymity. He wanted to be unknown, unpossessed by others' knowledge of him. That was freedom.

To live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you during the morning and evening rush, winding through the crowds of fellow commuters. To live in a city is to consume its offerings. To eat at its restaurants. To drink at its bars. To shop at its stores. To pay its sales taxes. To give a dollar to its homeless. To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?

I have always lived in the myth of New York more than in its reality.

Memories beget memories. Shen fever being a disease of remembering, the fevered are trapped indefinitely in their memories. But what is the difference between the fevered and us? Because I remember too, I remember perfectly. My memories replay, unprompted, on repeat. And our days, like theirs, continue in an infinite loop.

Let us return, then, as we do in times of grief, for the sake of pleasure but mostly for the need for relief, to art.

Upon seeing Utah for the first time, Tarkovsky remarked that now he knew Americans were vulgar because they filmed westerns in a place that should only serve as backdrop to films about God.

Leisure, the problem with the modern condition was the dearth of leisure. And finally, it took a force of nature to interrupt our routines. We just wanted to hit the reset button. We just wanted to feel flush with time to do things of no quantifiable value, our hopeful side pursuits like writing or drawing or something, something other than what we did for money.

It is too depressing, too soul-crushingly sad, to reminisce. The past is a black hole, cut into the present day like a wound, and if you come too close, you can get sucked in. You have to keep moving.

The End begins before you are ever aware of it. It passes as ordinary.

When other people are happy, I don't have to worry about them. There is room for my happiness.

There is mystery to how faith takes root and flourishes, how need transforms into belief.

New York is possibly the only place in which most people have already lived, in some sense, in the public imagination, before they ever arrive.

What I didn’t say was: I know you too well. You live your life idealistically. You think it’s possible to opt out of the system. No regular income, no health insurance. You quit jobs on a dime. You think this is freedom but I still see the bare, painstakingly cheap way you live, the scrimping and saving, and that is not freedom either. You move in circumscribed circles. You move peripherally, on the margins of everything, pirating movies and eating dollar slices. I used to admire this about you, how fervently you clung to your beliefs—I called it integrity—but five years of watching you live this way has changed me. In this world, money is freedom. Opting out is not a real choice.

To despise someone is intimate by default.

Just because you're adequately good at something doesn't mean that's what you should do.

A part of me wanted to remonstrate with her, to list out all her infractions in a final accounting, but the last days are for relief, not for truth.

All the lights were off, and I just lay there, trying to pass the hours before I had to get up and go to work, which was impossible when the night was so loud. My neighbor’s electric air conditioner, the bass pumping from other people’s cars. They were all converging together to say one thing: You are alone. You are alone. You are alone. You are truly and really alone.

I didn’t want the same things that they wanted, and they should know this. They should know my difference, they should sense my unfathomable fucking depths.

I was enjoying myself, but it was an insulated enjoyment. I was alone inside of it.

Seeing moonlight here at my bed and thinking it’s frost on the ground, I look up, gaze at the mountain moon, then back, dreaming of my old home.

I was like everyone else. We all hoped the storm would knock things over, fuck things up enough but not too much. We hoped the damage was bad enough to cancel work the next morning but not so bad that we couldn’t go to brunch instead.

You’re not doing too well. You barely eat. You don’t sleep enough. You don’t do things to keep your mind active. You don’t read. She says, Only in America do you have the luxury of being depressed. She says, Change your clothes. Brush your teeth. Wash your face. Moisturize. Exercise. Get yourself together. She says, Now is not the time to give up. It’s only going to get harder. You need to figure this out. And sometimes I say things back. Figure what out? I ask, but she doesn’t answer. Figure what out? I repeat, and the sound of my own voice jars me awake. I have been talking in my sleep.

I wanted to tell them that they had made a mistake. I wasn’t like them. I didn’t want the same things that they wanted, and they should know this. They should know my difference, they should sense my unfathomable fucking depths.

have always lived in the myth of New York more than in its reality. It is what enabled me to live there for so long, loving the idea of something more than the thing itself.

New York has a way of forgetting you.

I wake up. It is so silent. I could fall through the cracks of such silence.

Jonathan had become increasingly disillusioned with living in New York. Something along the lines of: the city, New York fucking City, tedious and boring, its charms as illusory as its facade of authenticity. Its lines were too long. Everything was a status symbol and everything cost too much. There were so many on-trend consumers, standing in lines for blocks to experience a fad dessert, gimmicky art exhibits, a new retail concept store. We were all making such uninspired lifestyle choices. We, including me.

To live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you during the morning and evening rush, winding through the crowds of fellow commuters. To live in a city is to consume its offerings. To eat at its restaurants. To drink at its bars. To shop at its stores. To pay its sales taxes. To give a dollar to its homeless. To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?

What is the internet but collective memory? Anything that had been done before we could do better.

The seriousness of the epidemic varied depending on which news source you trusted.

Just because you’re adequately good at something doesn’t mean that’s what you should do.

The city was so big. It lulled you into thinking that there were so many options, but most of the options had to do with buying things: dinner entrées, cocktails, the cover charge to a nightclub. Then there was the shopping, big chain stores open late, up and down the streets, throbbing with bass-heavy music and lighting. In the Garment District, diminished to a limited span of blocks after apparel manufacture moved overseas, wholesale shops sold fabrics and trinkets imported from China, India, Pakistan. In Jonathan’s apartment, we used to

We spoke until our voices grew hoarse, deepening and breaking and fissuring. It lasted early into morning. Our bodies curled inward, away from each other, dry leaves at the end of summer.

I have always lived in the myth of New York more than in its reality. It is what enabled me to live there for so long, loving the idea of something more than the thing itself.

We Googled is there a god, clicked I’m Feeling Lucky, and were directed to a suicide hotline site.

If you’re lucky enough to find something you’re good at, where people appreciate you, don’t thumb your nose at it. If it’s an issue of salary or benefits, I’m open to discussing it.

The internet is the flattening of time. It is the place where the past and the present exist on one single plane. But proportionally, because the present calcifies into the past, even now, even as we speak, perhaps it is more accurate to say that the internet almost wholly consists of the past. It is the place we go to commune with the past.

If Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling were a sound, it would be early/mid-nineties R&B. If it were a flavor, it would be the ice-cold Pepsi we drink as we turn down tiny alleyways where little kids defecate wildly. It is the feeling of drowning in a big hot open gutter, of crawling inside an undressed, unstanched wound that has never been cauterized.

Let us return, then, as we do in times of grief, for the sake of pleasure but mostly for the need for relief, to art. Or whatever. To music, to poetry, to paintings and installations, to TV and the movies. But mostly TV and the movies.

In this dream, I can’t speak. I try to open my lips, but I have none. I have no mouth, and even if I did, I have no language.

making jokes about “epidemic fashion.

A day off meant we could do things we’d always meant to do. Like go to the Botanical Garden, the Frick Collection, or something. Read some fiction. Leisure, the problem with the modern condition was the dearth of leisure. And finally, it took a force of nature to interrupt our routines. We just wanted to hit the reset button. We just wanted to feel flush with time to do things of no quantifiable value, our hopeful side pursuits like writing or drawing or something, something other than what we did for money. Like learn to be a better photographer. And even if we didn’t get around to it on that day, our free day, maybe it was enough just to feel the possibility that we could if we wanted to, which is another way of saying that we wanted to feel young, though many of us were that if nothing else.

if you are an individual employed by a corporation or an institution, he said, then the odds are leveraged against you. The larger party always wins. It can't see you, but it can crush you. And if that's the working world, then I don't want to be a part of it.

When other people are happy, I don’t have to worry about them. There is room for my happiness.

Tourists roamed through Times Square in scattered flocks, wearing useless face masks printed with I ♥ NY.

It lulled you into thinking that there were so many options, but most of the options had to do with buying things:

Shen Fever being a disease of remembering, the fevered are trapped indefinitely in their memories.

They thought we were in shock, I realized. They were treating us as if we were in shock. Then: We were in shock. Probably. This must be shock.

I emptied myself, lost myself in the work. I got up. I went to work in the morning. I went home in the evening. I repeated the routine.

I’m laughing because I have never had a personal conversation with Adam in all this time and he is telling me what to do. That’s pretty funny.

So, I said, searching. Tell me about what you do. I regretted it as soon as I asked. It was the question everyone asked everyone else in New York, so careerist, so boring.

No matter where you go, you can't escape the realities of this world.

The future is more exponentially exploding rents. The future is more condo buildings, more luxury housing bought by shell companies of the global wealthy elite. The future is more Whole Foods, aisles of refrigerated cut fruit packaged in plastic containers. The future is more Urban Outfitters, more Sephoras, more Chipotles. The future just wants more consumers.

His work ethic was like that of many other immigrants, eager to prove their usefulness to the country that had deigned to adopt them. He didn't get t to enjoy his life nearly enough.

The worm is very greedy, Balthasar said darkly. He eats all the food and doesn’t share. What lesson does that teach children? To eat with no—he paused, searching for the word—no conscience?

I tried to observe this feeling of shock, to observe its difference, but in fact I couldn’t detect any difference from all the other days that blurred together on this road trip. I couldn’t point to any deviation from the routine, everyday feeling, which was nothing. I didn’t feel anything.

The internet is the flattening of time. It is the place where the last and the present exist on one single plane. But proportionally, because the present calcifies into the past, even now, as we speak, perhaps it is more accurate to say that the internet almost wholly consists of the past. It is the place we go to commune with the past.

At work, they knew me to be capable but fragile. Quiet, clouded up with daydreams. Usually diligent, though sometimes inconsistent, moody. But also something else, something implacable: I was unsavvy in some fundamental, uncomfortable way.

they’re either very old, fevered, or random solitary types like us. Well, I’m assuming. I apologize—he glanced at me in the rearview mirror—if I’m being presumptuous here. It’s not too bad here if you can stand being alone, I corroborated.

Right before sleep when the brain is at its most porous and absorbs everything and weeps chemicals indiscriminately, I must have been deep in his reminiscing, his intricate, lacelike memories inlaid in me. I have been here in another lifetime.

She thought that maybe that serenity was inherited from my father, but it was actually, I wanted to say, a quality owed entirely to her. It had to do with the way she managed our days, so steady and constant and regulated. I have looked for that constancy everywhere.

Or like when we follow the Facebook profiles of our exes, Rachel said. We’re broken up but we never really break up. I never totally forget the past because I’m seeing it on my Facebook wall every day. You can never reinvent yourself because your social media identity is set.

When I was a kid, I named this feeling Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling. It is not a cohesive thing, this feeling, it reaches out and bludgeons everything. It is excitement tinged by despair. It is despair heightened by glee. It is partly sexual in nature, though it precedes sexual knowledge.

He dictates and enforces the rules, rules that only he fully knows and understands. He sees us as subjects, to reward or to punish. He complements you when he wants to control you. He doesn't see you. It doesn't mean he's not a person. It doesn't mean he's not vulnerable. In certain moments, he's just vulnerable enough that you feel sympathy for him. You make excuses for him, often to yourself. You think that if you just work with him a little, that eventually things will get better.

You think this is freedom but I still see the bare, painstakingly cheap way you live, the scrimping and saving, and that is not freedom either. You move in circumscribed circles. You move peripherally, on the margins of everything, pirating movies and eating dollar slices. I used to admire this about you, how fervently you clung to your beliefs—I called it integrity—but five years of watching you live this way has changed me. In this world, money is freedom. Opting out is not a real choice.

Robert Polidori photographs of Chernobyl and Pripyat, a ghost town that formerly housed the nuclear-plant workers. Or the Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre images of Detroit, the images of abandoned auto plants and once-grand theaters. And the Seph Lawless images of the vacant, decrepit shopping malls that closed after the 2008 crash.

You think it’s possible to opt out of the system. No regular income, no health insurance. You quit jobs on a dime. You think this is freedom but I still see the bare, painstakingly cheap way you live, the scrimping and saving, and that is not freedom either. You move in circumscribed circles. You move peripherally, on the margins of everything,

The past is a black hole, cut into the present day like a wound, and if you come too close, you can get sucked in. You have to keep moving

looked at me. Bob gave me a look. Candace. When you wake up in a fictitious world, your only frame of reference is fiction.

Me, nothing really weighed on me, nothing unique. Me, I held down an office job and fiddled around with some photography when the moon hit the Gowanus right.

Everyone wanted to be an Art Girl. I wanted to be an Art Girl.

We used to be so close, she would say, periodically, apropos of nothing. There was a tinge of wistfulness, but that was all.

(given the scope of the epidemic, we had begun to understand that the masks were not fever-preventative),

I don’t understand this festive mood, Jonathan said, indicating outside the window. Well, they won’t have to work tomorrow, I explained.

A day off meant we could do things we’d always meant to do.

The key thing, we reminded ourselves, was never to stop, to always keep going, even when the past called us back to a time and place we still leaned toward, still sang of, in quieter moments.

In the midst of this imagining, I heard, out from nowhere, the distant sound of sleigh bells. I was going crazy. But there, right in front of me, across the street, was a horse – chestnut, with white spots – trotting down the street. It trotted long purposefully, cheerfully, unhurried, down Broadway. Holding my breath, I managed to find my phone and snap a photo before it disappeared from sight…. I uploaded the photo I just took. I added a caption: If a horse rides through Times Square and no one is there to see it, did it actually happen? If New York is breaking down and no one documents it, is it actually happening? I clicked Publish.

He didn’t take his eyes off the screen. They’re saying that the military are just shooting into the crowds. The protests are peaceful. He looked at her, stunned. Are you sure that’s right? We’re watching American news.

I was like everyone else. We all hoped the storm would knock things over, fuck things up enough but not too much. We hoped the damage was bad enough to cancel work the next morning but not so bad that we couldn’t go to brunch instead. Brunch? he echoed skeptically. Okay, maybe not brunch, I conceded. If not brunch, then something else. A day off meant we could do things we’d always meant to do. Like go to the Botanical Garden, the Frick Collection, or something. Read some fiction. Leisure, the problem with the modern condition was the dearth of leisure. And finally, it took a force of nature to interrupt our routines. We just wanted to hit the reset button. We just wanted to feel flush with time to do things of no quantifiable value, our hopeful side pursuits like writing or drawing or something, something other than what we did for money. Like learn to be a better photographer. And even if we didn’t get around to it on that day, our free day, maybe it was enough just to feel the possibility that we could if we wanted to, which is another way of saying that we wanted to feel young, though many of us were that if nothing else.

What I didn't say was: I know you too well. You live your life idealistically. You think it's possible to opt out of the system. No regular income, no health insurance. You quit jobs on a dime. You think this is freedom but I still see the bare, painstakingly cheap way you live, the scrimping and saving, and that is not freedom either. You move in circumscribed circles. You move peripherally, on the margins of everything, pirating movies and eating dollar slices. I used to admire this about you, how fervently you clung to your beliefs-- I called it integrity-- but five years of watching you live this way has changed me. In this world, money is freedom. Opting out is not a real choice.

I have seen his face in its many variations. I have seen it when he's angry, when he's satisfied, when he tries to project control. I have been on his good side and his bad side. It is a face I have spent a lot of time trying to read, trying to appeal to, trying to capitulate to, trying to pretend for. I have always positioned myself in relation to him, thinking I could toe the line, thinking it would be fine if I just cooperated, thinking if only I compressed myself a little more.

As the fire subsided and the embers dimmed, I imagined them combing through the mountain of items, dumbstruck by the dizzying abundance. I imagined that it would be more than they would ever need, more than they knew what to do with, even in eternity.

If you are an individual employed by a corporation or an institution, he said, then the odds are leveraged against you. The larger party always wins. It can't see you, but it can crush you. And if that's the working world, then I don't want to be a part of it.

In the past year, Jonathan had become increasingly disillusioned with living in New York. Something along the lines of: the city, New York fucking City, tedious and boring, its charms as illusory as its facade of authenticity. Its lines were too long. Everything was a status symbol and everything cost too much. There were so many on-trend consumers, standing in lines for blocks to experience a fad dessert, gimmicky art exhibits, a new retail concept store. We were all making such inspired lifestyle choices. We, including me.

We had shame, so much shame at being the few survivors. Other survivors, if they existed, must also feel this way. We were ashamed of leaving people behind, of taking our comforts where we could find them, of stealing from those who could not defend themselves. We had known ourselves to be cowards and hypocrites, pernicious liars really, and to find this suspicion confirmed was not a relief but a horror. If the End was Nature’s way of punishing us so that we might once again know our place, then yes, we knew it. If it was at all unclear before, it was not now.

All of the day’s planned tasks are canceled. Bob stays inside Hot Topic for the rest of the day. Left to their own devices, the group huddles together in the communal Old Navy on the first floor. At first, I think they’re holding a memorial service, but then I hear the TV playing. They’re watching DVDs of Friends on a giant, monolithic plasma screen. A citywide blackout forces Monica, Ross, Rachel, Phoebe, and Joey to hang out together. They light candles and talk about the weirdest places they’ve had sex. Phoebe sings a song. I hate Friends but I’ve seen most of the episodes.

At work, they knew me to be capable but fragile. Quiet, clouded up with daydreams. Usually diligent, though sometimes inconsistent, moody. But also something else, something implacable: I was unsavvy in some fundamental, uncomfortable way. The sound of my loud, nervous laugh, like gargling gravel, was a social liability. I skipped too many office parties. They kept me on because my output was prolific and they could task me with more and more production assignments. When I focused a trait I exhibited at the beginning of my time there, I could be detail-oriented to the point of obsession.

Once, in sixth-grade history, we watched a documentary on King Tut. When the archaeologists first opened his tomb, they heard a loud tearing sound, like a knife gashing through cloth. It was the sound of all the textiles inside the tomb, the imperial fabrics, ripping at the sudden exposure to fresh air.

Leisure, the problem with the modern condition was the dearth of leisure. And finally, it took a force of nature to interrupt our routines. We just wanted to hit the reset button. We just wanted to feel flush with time to do things of no quantifiable value, our hopeful side pursuits like writing or drawing or something, something other than what we did for money. Like learn to be a better photographer. And even if we didn't get around to it on that day, our free day, maybe it was enough just to feel the possibility that we could if we wanted to, which is another way of saying that we wanted to feel young, though many of us were that if nothing else.

The God we know is the God of second chances, the pastor said. But it is also a responsibility to accept and shoulder the second chance that God gives you. A second chance doesn’t mean that you’re in the clear. In many ways, it is the more difficult thing. Because a second chance means that you have to try harder. You must rise to the challenge without the blind optimism of ignorance.

There is mystery to how faith takes root and flourishes, how need transforms into belief. Suffice to say, Zhigang and Ruifang came to know the customs and traditions of Protestant Christianity. They learned biblical stories and verses. They learned the hymns by heart. But the thing that Ruifang found most comforting about this religion was prayer. She prayed, at first imitating others during group prayers, and then eventually on her own, alone in the basement apartment. It was during the afternoons, her vision blurry and fingers stiff and fatigued from hooking wigs, that she sat down at the kitchen table and clasped her hands. It would become an important ritual, the one routine that granted her a sense of control. She practically invented her own life in America by praying, she liked to say.

To live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you during the morning and evening rush, winding through the crowds of fellow commuters. To live in a city is to consume its offerings. To eat at its restaurants. To drink at its bars. To shop at its stores. To pay its sales taxes. To give a dollar to its homeless.

e Googled maslow’s pyramid to see how many of the need levels we could already fulfill. The first two. We Googled 2011 fever survivors, hoping to find others like us, and when all we found were the same outdated, inconclusive news articles, we Googled 7 stages grief to track our emotional progress. We were at Anger, the slower among us lagging behind at Denial. We Googled is there a god, clicked I’m Feeling Lucky, and were directed to a suicide hotline site.

He dictates and enforces the rules, rules that only he fully knows and understands. He sees us as subjects, to reward or to punish. He compliments you when he wants to control you. He doesn’t see you. It doesn’t mean he’s not a person. It doesn’t mean he’s not vulnerable. In certain moments, he’s just vulnerable enough that you feel sympathy for him. You make excuses for him, often to yourself. You think that if you just work with him a little, then eventually things will get better.

We walk the streets of Fuzhou at night, in the one summer when I come back. Streetlights send our elongated shadows tumbling ahead of us, across the neon-tinged storefronts and buzzing lamps. Everyone comes out, the old men in wife-beaters and plastic sandals, the teenagers in fake American Eagle. Senior citizen ladies roll out before bedtime in pajama pants printed with SpongeBob or fake Chanel logos. There is a Mickey D's and a KFC, street dumpling stands, bootleg shops, karaoke bars. Everything is open late, midnight or even later. There are places to get a full-body massage, an eight ball, a happy ending. If you stay on these streets long enough, it's possible you could get everything you want, have ever wanted. Because I disremember everything, because I watch a lot of China travel shows when I am alone at night in New York, because TV mixes with my dreams mixes with my memories, we walk along the concourse that runs alongside the river even though there is no river, we turn down boulevards punctuated by palm-tree clusters even though those belong in Singapore, we smoke cigarettes openly even though it's unseemly for women, especially in my family, to smoke in public. But the feeling, the feeling of being in Fuzhou at night, remains the same.

One night, when I still lived in my Bushwick studio, I opened up the medicine cabinet, searching for Clinique skin exfoliant, and saw Jonathan’s mug. Inside, there was his retainer, soaking in old green mouthwash. My heart leaped, and for a while, inexplicable second, I thought he must’ve not left New York after all. I stood over the sink and eased the thing into my mouth. It was too big. His teeth were not my teeth. I looked at myself, my freakish, grotesque self, a mouthful of metal and plastic jutting out, and knew I was alone. I spit the retainer out. I washed it, filled the mug with fresh mouthwash, and placed it back in the medicine cabinet. I thought, absurdly, that I’d keep his retainer fresh, for when he returned. That’s where it still is, in my old apartment.

When I moved to the U.S. at six, I was unrecognizable to my mother. I was angry, chronically dissatisfied, bratty. On my second day in America, she ran out of the room in tears after I angrily demanded that she buy me a pack of colored pencils. You're not you! she sputtered between sobs, which brought me to a standstill. She couldn't recognize me. That's what she told me later, that this was not the daughter she had last seen. Being too young, I didn't know enough to ask: But what did you expect? Who am I supposed to be to you? But if I was unrecognizable to her, she was also unrecognizable to me. In this new country, she was disciplinarian, restrictive, prone to angry outbursts, easily frustrated, so fascist with arbitrary rules that struck me, even as a six-year-old, as unreasonable. For most of my childhood and adolescence, my mother was my antagonist. Whenever she'd get mad, she'd take her index finger and poke me in the forehead. You you you you you, she'd say, as if accusing me of being me. She was quick to blame me for the slightest infractions, a spilled glass, a way of sitting while eating, my future ambitions (farmer or teacher), the way I dressed, what I ate, even the way I practiced English words in the car..She was the one to deny me: the extra dollar added to my allowance; an extra hour to my curfew; the money to buy my friends' birthday presents, so that I was forced to gift them, no matter what the season, leftover Halloween candy. In those early days, we lived so frugally that we even washed, alongside the dishes in the sink, used sheets of cling wrap for reuse. She was the one to punish me, sending me to kneel in the bathtub of the darkened bathroom, carrying my father's Casio watch with an alarm setting to account for when time was up. Yet it was I who would kneel for even longer, going further and further, taking more punishment just to spite her, just to show that it meant nothing. I could take more. The sun moved across the bathroom floor, from the window to the door.