Monica Drake Quotes

The Buddhists say if you meet somebody and your heart pounds, your hands shake, your knees go weak, that’s not the one. When you meet your ‘soul mate’ you’ll feel calm. No anxiety, no agitation.

When life sucks, throw yourself into art.

The only value of wasted time is knowledge.

I thought I was old, back then. I thought I was grown up. I didn’t know all my big mistakes were up ahead of me, still to come. Always

Ooo la la! That kiss was fine, and it was full of all the words I didn't need to say.

She didn’t call. That was good. If she called, she’d have a chance to cancel.

Everything was out in our crowded lawn, really—love, anger and jealousy. History and intimacy. You could breath it in, thick as fog. I wanted to yell, Get out of our yard!

In the middle of a wrist's suicide slash-line, below the layered skin and above the pulse, there's an acupuncture point that says, Get back to who you were meant to be. This is the heart spot, the center. Your whole life the skin on that place will stay closest to being a baby's skin, as close as you can get anymore to the way you started, the way you once thought you'd always be.

Maybe da Vinci didn’t serve lamb in his painting of the Last Supper, but there was room for interpretation. Jesus himself was the lamb led to the slaughter.

Playing Frisbee gave Sean permission to look at Lu, across a short distance. He didn’t have to feel stupid for staring.

We’re mourning and celebrating at the same time, so drink.

I asked the cardiologist why an electrocardiogram was called an EKG, instead of an ECG. He said, "Nazis. Nazis invented the machine." After he left, I found a napkin on my breakfast tray and wrote that down: EKG = Nazis.

I watched the moon through the window. It was a beautiful, floating illusion of a still point in the universe. Dark shadows passed over the plains, mountains and water.

Outside the window, one lone car passed and threw a violent blast of rainwater over the sidewalk. It was a storm, by now. Looking at that rain, I was falling deeply in love with our warm bar. What could you do, with a world like that? I was in love with every minute of being alive even as I floundered.

Love is a demon. It would take over, and it would kill us, but first it would keep us all alive.

Space is never empty. Emotions have vectors and velocity. You can crush a person from a distance. Sometimes the first weapon is the act or art of pulling away.

There is no such thing as a truly single person, only a lonely one. Humans are porous in the borders of our skins, these walking micro cities.

This was my language. The house was talking to me. It was telling me about my own mistakes: they don’t go away. The trash goes out, but it seeps back in tiny increments, like the backflow of blood, the rush that causes a heart murmur.

The day Travis met Lu he was in his best suit—dark blue, pinstripes, a necktie. Women his age would see right through his sweat and pretense. Any woman his age, she’d say, “What, you work at Men’s Warehouse now?” Yeah, a woman would know a cheap suit was like an easy costume, but the girls didn’t catch on.

Buying kids booze was against the law but hell, it wasn’t the worst thing he’d done. After that, it turned into a thing—they’d see him and wave, and they knew his name and let him be one of theirs, one of them. They cut a small place in the world for him to belong.

He was hurt. He was a man who needed a country. I was a woman who needed a man. I’d be his country. He’d be my dictator. I saw our future unfold like a history book.

What I feel in that kitchen is the way humans are so flawed and so perfect, and I want to share bodies. You know your old dog? That’s how I feel—I want to climb on people, breathe their breath, lick the inside of stranger’s mouths. I don’t know these two, but who do we ever know, really, past the skin? How do we get there?

The Buddhists say if you meet somebody and your heart pounds, your hands shake, your knees go weak, that’s not the one. When you meet your soul mate you’ll feel calm. No anxiety, no agitation. I say, the Buddhists don’t have a clue.

The Arboretum’s overgrown grass rustled. The branches of an apple tree shook as though an animal had jumped from one to the next. A wind slid up my thighs, in the night, under my short nightgown. Crickets and cicadas made a sound like distant laughing children, the laugh track to a sitcom that didn’t end. It was like the grass was full of tiny giggling babies. So beautiful, and creepy.

You will be my favorite ex,” I whispered in his ear. “I’ll be your fifth former wife. We’ll mutter crazy dreams together then apart, but you will always be with me.” His breath was warm and so very human, not demonic at all. He said, “Don’t break my nose.” I said, “I won’t even break your heart.

My head was so light. Wind sang through the field grass. The same wind brushed hair off my face, soft as my mother’s hand, and when the falling snow started to clump into flakes, each thick flake came down with the love of a frozen kiss, like somebody was saving up, freezing their warm love for later.

The moon was now paper-thin and fading. That moon was sky-tinged, the way you could see right through it to the blue of the evening light, and it was hung like a damp tissue as though pressed against glass.

Where we grew up, we didn’t learn how to live. We learned how to bury the land, seal life off. There was an unacknowledged backdrop to being a kid on land that was fast turning into strip malls, when you loved trees and a silent corporate presence kept showing up to knock the trees down. It was the helpless sense that everything you ever loved could be destroyed, without debate.

I kneeled in front of the E M T chair, in front of the mirror on the medicine cabinet, and wiped the rest of the makeup away. My skin was raw, pink and new. The ambulance had a single round light in the middle of the ceiling. The light cast long shadows under my nose, ears, eyes, and chin, and in the shadows I was young and I was a crone, in the exact same moment. That's it, I thought: life is short. The only value of wated time is knowledge. p.295

Shadows fell across us, a flicker in dim light. Somebody passed at the mouth of the alley. He said, “We could both be killed.” I whispered, “Sure. In grade school, a boy choked on Jell-O, it’s that common.” I laughed, drunk on our future. Death seemed a small risk. “We can have the world.

I, American in body and spirit, healthy, debauched and dedicated to travel, had no date. I felt a simmering discontent. What good was freedom when I wasn’t free to hand it over, what use was the currency of my body if I couldn’t spend it?

He said, “Only you.” I was alone and he was alone and we had nothing in common short of being human at night.

When I stand around all day, into the afternoon, I start to feel like a good bike pulled to the curb. I’m every car that’s ever idled, a motorcycle gulping its own exhaust, lurching toward open road. I’m paid to stand, and I get this feeling my body is waiting for my mind to figure out what I’m supposed to do with being alive.

Despair. I’d been told I suffered from it too. The thing was, I never sensed myself in despair, but rather, in love with something I felt closest to only when walking or riding my bike in the city. I felt it when I kept my windows open all night, or sitting on the rickety wood of the porch my landlord called a fire escape, peeled paint flaking under my hands and feet, looking over the empty lot. It had to do with a texture, with the moon and a stray white cat I’d been feeding, a cat that saw me as home now.

You’ll freeze out here,” he said. What did he know? I was already a sheet of ice, a frozen branch, a twig. I could freeze in my own house, if I wanted to. The man’s eyes darted down the road. I was an icy slip of nothing. I was invincible.

Which on am I?" I drew my left eyebrow in a high, puzzled arch. "Which what?" Crack reached for her makeup kit. "Bottom or fool?" She pulled out a tiny mirror and put another layer of mascara on her giant fake lashes. She used a special oversized mascara brush for her oversized lashes, carried in a big tube. "No. Trixie, Twinkie, or Bubbles?" I asked. "Who, in the show?" She shrugged. "What ever you want, Sugar. Makes no diff to me. A name's just another kind of package. Marketing. Starts the day you're born" p.136

And she thought, Who the hell are you, Mister? But his eyes were blue and his hair was thick, and his arms were strong and sinewy. He had a Nevada tan, desert tan, wherever he’d been living, wherever he sometimes went. He was gorgeous, that hothead. She put an orange segment in her mouth, held it out toward his mouth, leaned in, rolled on top of him, her body over his, and he bit into the orange, gulped it even, made his mouth ready for more, for her, like he’d been starving.

Terrifying things happen in even ordinary houses, with ordinary families. Terrifying things come in very small pieces, slowly seeping in. I took a walk down the driveway on our land, just to feel the trees reach for me in the dark. I touched their leaves. Those trees whispered, You are a conduit. That’s what they said! To me. And I understood--I was between mother and child, between the natural world and the concrete overtaking us, between the living and the dead, and I could hear history talking to me, showing me its stories in code. It sounded crazy, but not as crazy as pretending our lives were new, and separate from all the people who had come and died before.

Come with me, Mack,” I said. “Back to my place.” I tried to pull my hand back. Our fingers were intertwined like those bloody hospital robes. I didn’t mind, even when he scared me a little. The blood that kept us alive was trapped just under our skin, racing through veins. All those cells inside and out were fighting for a way to move closer together, beyond the trap of skin, dependent on breath.

I felt stiff, the way I moved when I took that first bite, like I was eating something in church. He’d made that sausage so carefully. Food was his thing. I took another bite. I did. I ate it. I ate the dead man’s hot and meaty sandwich. It was good. […] When you see women who don’t eat? Or women who cleanse, detox and purge? I think they’ve done something like this. They’ve eaten in a way that’s left a memory, a creepy ghost, a body inside their own body.

I whispered, "Do you have a rubber?" He laughed, hushed, a laughing whisper, as though his parents were in the next room, and reached one arm past my head to a nightstand there. "A rubber chicken." He shook the dancing chicken in the air. "Will that do?" I laughed back, ran a finger along the bumps of the fake chicken skin. "Ribbed and beaked for her pleasure, even. Want me to leave you two alone?" He threw the chicken on the floor and bit my neck and I giggled and he said, "Never," and he was everywhere then. The couch was a sinking place and I disappeared into the orgy of costumes, the smell of nervous strangers, makeup and smoke, my naked body buried in the perfume of human need. I took the rubber chicken home. Plucky was my mascot, the souvenir of our date. Later, much later, there was the conception of our child. And now the miscarriage, unexpected, though I should've expected it because, why not? -- family slid through my fingers the same as the old silicone banana-peel trick. After the D&C, after the suctioning away of our tiny fetus, I drew the black heart on Plucky's rubber breast in the place where a chicken might have a heart, over the ridges of implied feathers. Indelible ink. Now she'd been nabbed by a kid too young to know what love means, what a chicken might mean. Too young to know that a rubber chicken can carry all of love in one indelible ink heart.

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Evvie, I can’t get over how great your house is,” Monica said, grabbing the conversational wheel and pulling as hard as she could away from the ditch as the tires squealed.