Olivia Gatwood Quotes

One more thing when they call you a bitch, say thank you. say thank you, very much.

I want to know what it means to survive something. does it just mean I get to keep my body?

They will tell you home is safe zone. No, bitch face is safe zone. Bitch face is home. Bitch face is cutting off the ladder, willing to burn in the apartment, if it means he can't get in.

The truth is: It is a privilege to have your body looked for.

16. Laughter is not about humor, it is about acknowledging a shared joy. Laughter is about bonding. EXAMPLE: WHEN I HEAR MEN LAUGHING, I DO NOT ENTER THE ROOM. I CRAWL HOME IN THE DARK. ("Mans/Laughter")

Reader, I cannot promise you will be less afraid when you finish this book, but I hope you will feel more able to name what lives inside you.

It's easy to hurt someone who looks just like you, especially when you hate yourself.

What is more teen girl than not being loved, but wanting it so badly that you accept the smallest crumb and call yourself full?

Maybe, the only reason we fall in love is to see what we look like to someone else." ("The Lover as a Cult")

I want to write a poem for the women on Long Island who, when I show them the knife I carry in my purse, tell me it’s not big enough, ("Ode to the Women On Long Island")

Maybe I see myself in the worst of it. Maybe if I can imagine myself in the shallow water, you should too. Maybe I am tired of hearing people talk about the murder of girls like it is both beautiful and out of the ordinary.

Sometimes, the writer in me wants to remember just so I can give you a story.

i hate telling people how it happened. there is a difference between fact & truth. the fact is that she overdosed. the truth is that he killed her.

You must know the width of the knife and how it ruined you, name the organs it kissed.

They see us as kids now, but the beatdowns will be different when they don’t. There is a special hatred reserved for women and women alone.

Some things are more a feeling than they are a memory.

If you have a son, how will you love him? She is pacing the living room, while the Thanksgiving Day Parade plays behind her, a montage of inflated cartoon bodies, floating slow down 6th Avenue, smiles painted onto their faces. I consider not responding. I consider explaining that I can love him and not trust him. I consider saying that I won’t love him at all. Just to scare her. Instead, I say, If I am ever murdered, like, body found in a ditch, mouth stuffed with dirt, stocking around my neck, identified by my toenails, please don’t go looking for a guilty woman. ("My Grandmother Asks Why I Don't Trust Men")

The men re-tighten my bolts just for safe measure. The men open my car door, Ladies first. The men are always helping. One man asks how I reach the pedals. One man asks where my daddy is. One man opens his trunk and says, Bet you’re small enough to fit.

it’s just that i am not afraid of blood which is also part of being a girl. but being the only girl means making yourself lose when you’ve won too much so i bounce the coin off the rim of the shot glass and let johnny slice me open.

what does it mean to have an instinct? does it just mean I was born to avoid a certain breed of death?

Men always want to come inside you so that if they give you a sickness or a baby, you are bound to them forever. People will tell you men don’t like commitment and the first rule is that you shouldn’t believe them. Remember, sickness or a baby. Neither of which they’ll take care of.

ALTERNATE UNIVERSE IN WHICH I AM UNFAZED BY THE MEN WHO DO NOT LOVE ME when the businessman shoulder checks me in the airport, i do not apologize. instead, i write him an elegy on the back of a receipt and tuck it in his hand as i pass through the first class cabin. like a bee, he will die after stinging me. i am twenty-four and have never cried. once, a boy told me he doesn’t “believe in labels” so i embroidered the word chauvinist on the back of his favorite coat. a boy said he liked my hair the other way so i shaved my head instead of my pussy. while the boy isn’t calling back, i learn carpentry, build a desk, write a book at the desk. i taught myself to cum from counting ceiling tiles. the boy says he prefers blondes and i steam clean his clothes with bleach. the boy says i am not marriage material and i put gravel in his pepper grinder. the boy says period sex is disgusting and i slaughter a goat in his living room. the boy does not ask if he can choke me, so i pretend to die while he’s doing it. my mother says this is not the meaning of unfazed. when the boy says i curse too much to be pretty and i tattoo “cunt” on my inner lip, my mother calls this “being very fazed.” but left over from the other universe are hours and hours of waiting for him to kiss me and here, they are just hours. here, they are a bike ride across long island in june. here, they are a novel read in one sitting. here, they are arguments about god or a full night’s sleep. here, i hand an hour to the woman crying outside of the bar. i leave one on my best friend’s front porch, send my mother two in the mail. i do not slice his tires. i do not burn the photos. i do not write the letter. i do not beg. i do not ask for forgiveness. i do not hold my breath while he finishes. the man tells me he does not love me, and he does not love me. the man tells me who he is, and i listen. i have so much beautiful time.

No one was expecting me but everyone is relieved I am here. I am dressed perfectly for this weather. I am so glad I chose this outfit. I know exactly how to dance to this music.[...] I can make anyone fall in love with me, as long as they aren’t close by.

i am not afraid of blood which is also part of being a girl

ODE TO THE WORD PUSSY I could devote my time to justifying your name by defending the feline. But what about the lioness, I might say, colossal queen of the animal kingdom, or even a house cat, twitching mouse caught in its claws, how could my body not be that? But

You yourself are unsure whether to remain frozen in time or to grow upward with the coming rain.

I wanna be all the girls I've ever loved.

I once heard the word 'conversation' described as a progression of exchanges but there is no progress here so maybe I will instead compare this to the bullet drop—the idea that if you shoot a gun & drop a bullet from the same location they will hit the floor at the same time, hundreds of feet apart. ("The Lover as a Dream")

blush so pink like learn what your face is good for everyone is nauseous blush so pink like rash, infection so pink like itch and burn blush so pink like learn how to love quieter, circus girl it’s making us all sick.

Another rule to good storytelling is that no one wants a half-remembered tragedy. You must know the width of the knife and how it ruined you, name the organs it kissed.

I don't know how to not become the people I bring home.

What am I, if not yours? What do I do with my hands when they are just hands?

One man asks how I reach the pedals. One man asks where my daddy is. One man opens his trunk and says, Bet you’re small enough to fit.

when they call you a bitch, say thank you. say thank you, very much.

WHEN I SAY THAT WE ARE ALL TEEN GIRLS what I mean is that when my grandmother called to ask why I didn’t respond to her letter, all I heard was, Why didn’t you text me back? Why don’t you love me?

Even the men who laugh their condescending laughs when a teen girl faints at the sight of her favorite pop star, even those men are teen girls, the way they want so badly to be big and important and worshipped by someone.

Aileen, I wish I could’ve taken you there. It’s too late now. I wish you hadn’t hurt all those people. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I know you hate it when I say that, what I meant was that I wish all those people hadn’t hurt you. ("Aileen Wuornos Isn't My Hero")

I kicked and screamed my way through it and so will you, I can tell by the way that you walk.

No one wants a half remembered tragedy. You must know the width of the knife and how it ruined you, name the organs it kissed.

We have the composite sketch in our pockets. We held it up to our fathers while they slept.

ODE TO MY BITCH FACE you

ODE TO THE WOMEN ON LONG ISLAND after

The only thing I trust about myself is how good I am with words. I can make anyone fall in love with me, as long as they aren’t close by.

Laughter is not about humor, it is about acknowledging a shared joy. Laughter is about bonding. EXAMPLE: WHEN I HEAR MEN LAUGHING, I DO NOT ENTER THE ROOM. I CRAWL HOME IN THE DARK.

the boy says he prefers blondes and i steam clean his clothes with bleach. the boy says i am not marriage material and i put gravel in his pepper grinder. the boy says period sex is disgusting and i slaughter a goat in his living room. the boy does not ask if he can choke me, so i pretend to die while he’s doing it.

I am nine. We are bored and Karen is dying. We drove to Austin that summer so Sarah's dad- who described Karen as /the great and impossible love/ of his life, who taught us the word /lymphoma/ and then, the concept of the prefix, how it explains where the tumor lives- could say goodbye. The house is a rind spooned out by the onset of death, what's left in the medicine cabinet full of razors & we are hungry & alone & sitting on the living room floor where the light from a naked window slices the hardwood like a melon, brandishes each, individualfuzz on my scabbed calf a field of erect, yellow poppies & we have been alive as girls long enough to know to scowl at this reveal & what better time than now to practice removal. Once, I watched my mother skin a potato in six perfect strokes I remember this as Sarah teaches me to prop up my leg on the side of the tub and runs the blade along my thing, /See?/ she says, /Isn't that so much better?/ Before we left Albuquerque her father warned us, /She will have no hair/ a trait we have just begun to admire except, of course for the hair he is talking about we hold against our necks, that which will get us compliments or scouted in a mall, eventually cut off by our envious sisters while we sleep.

The language of true crime is coded—it tells us our degree of mourning is contingent on the victim’s story. While students and athletes are often remembered for their accolades and looks, sex workers or women who struggled with addiction are reduced to those identities as a justification for the violence committed against them—if their stories are even covered at all. The truth is: It is a privilege to have your body looked for. True crime, while being a genre that so many women rely on for contorted validation, is, simultaneously, a perpetuator of misogyny, racism, and sexualized violence—all of which is centered around one, beloved, dead girl. It is a genre primarily produced by men. A genre that complicates how we bond over our love for it, often unsure of who identifies with the victim and who identifies with the perpetrator.

our bodies are the only things we own, leave our kids with nothing when we die

Laughter is not about humor, it is about acknowledging a shared joy. Laughter is about bonding. EXAMPLE: WHEN I HEAR MEN LAUGHING, I DO NOT ENTER THE ROOM.

But every time I read the news, I am pummeled by stories of missing girls, murdered girls, women killed by their revenge-seeking former boyfriends, and it becomes increasingly difficult to call the murder of women “rare.” It is impossible to call my fear “irrational.

girls go missing right around the corner but she needs a tiara for us to mourn her naturally attractive, exceptionally bright how many ways can we say the word white?

dab your eye, we know you like it gory only the blondes get a cover story

the scream will get buried in a landfill somewhere in new jersey & later the landfill will be coated in grass, where a wandering child will see a hill, will throw her body against it & shriek the whole way down.

that was the lesson, my father, who knows, and i mean really knows, my sadness, knew that i didn’t need to be told, i needed to see, that despite it all, there was still something alive beneath me.

In line at the bank, the man behind me wears no socks with his boat shoes and auditions for the role of killer.

What is more teen girl than not being loved but wanting it so badly that you accept the smallest crumb and call yourself full;

just trying to dance at the party then someone asks you to smile and the blood begins to riot

how can you sleep pretty when there are four locks on the door and the fire escape feels like break-in bait?

So praise my iron cheeks, my fake bitch grin and moan, praise the day I ditched the parade of wrap and suck, then cut out my old tongue and left it to rot in the sun.

uncovering the wet myth of sex

Maybe I am tired of hearing people talk about the murder of girls like it is both beautiful and out of the ordinary.

When my father and I go for a jog on the arroyo and he runs ahead, leaving me alone with my breath and an empty trail, I keep running—but now, from something. When I cross a coyote drinking from the ditch, I am relieved it is an animal.

Maybe, the only reason we fall in love is to see what we look like to someone else.

When you told me that you admired the way I scrubbed a toilet, I heard, Everything you touch becomes new.

everything i put inside of myself somehow ends up inside of you instead & so you grow & i shrink

there is a difference between fact & truth. the fact is that she overdosed. the truth is that he killed her.]

we are born from the same city of worry & doubt & fear of loss but always end up so far from each other.

When I learned that rapists can be identified by the flesh under their victims’ fingernails, I offered to scratch my boyfriend’s back.

I’ve never been in a fist fight but I think I’m a great candidate.

Do you know how to have fun at parties if there’s no one to flirt with?

though the girl does believe she knows most things, she is willing to accept a new vocabulary from the boy.

She says, I do plenty of things once a day, shower, set my alarm, call my father to tell him I am safe. She says, What is love if not being needed and unzipping your throat, if not letting the rats underneath the sink live because it is the middle of winter?

no one cared whether she ever showed up [except for those who loved her who knew she was more than her rap sheet

A man who now I might call a boy, but back then, a man,

The papers named him the West Mesa Bone Collector and named the girls transient and troubled and missing for years.

Maybe, I say. But I am aways stunned by the fearlessness of violent men.

What I said   happened is what happened

when a girl was murdered while jogging in Queens, the women on Long Island were unstartled and furious, they did not call to warn daughters. They called their sons.

but I kicked and screamed my way through it, and so will you, I can tell by the way you walk. One more thing: When they call you a bitch, say thank you. Say thank you, very much.

Until I read the back of every box.

I slam down the glass until it cracks up the side and now the game is about who will still drink from it, who will risk shards in the belly, who will cut up their insides for a pack of Newports and it’s not that I even want the cigarettes, it’s just that i am not afraid of blood which is also part of being a girl.

like small children lining up behind a telescope, giddy for a suddenly reachable universe.

At some point I’ll tell you why I didn’t go to the wake. I guess I never really knew Johnny like that. By that I mean sober or in a church. When I say I didn’t go to the wake I mean I drove by his house every day for two years and the for sale sign never got taken down like the house would always be Johnny’s.

Who knows what we got from it? Maybe a loosie, or a ride, or a chance to finish a sentence.

Aileen, I have no friends left from high school, tell me what I'm doing wrong. Tell me why I love to quit.

I ask for my things, you give me a garbage bag. I ask for my coat, you beg me to leave it.

We are sitting on the cusp of Spring. We are always sitting on the cusp of Spring.

It seems, somehow, Elephant Butte Lake has made a hobby out of taking my boys and leaving me to carry the weight.

ODE TO MY PERIOD UNDERWEAR I

And then, of course, before I can praise the right for its already perfect form you shine, or bloom, or become the bird in flight and I lose my breath, drop my binoculars, don’t care that I can’t see you anymore, because what is sight really? Your hand unseeable, yes, but inside me also and what is that if not sight? What is the sky if not my body,

don’t want to talk about the men who tried to kill Aileen or how she killed them first, I don’t want to talk about how self-defense doesn’t make you a serial killer, about how she said if a hundred men had tried to rape her, she would have killed a hundred men.

and I sat in the dark, unfazed, while my phone battery dwindled, computer dimmed to dead,

and no matter how much I reassure her, I cannot explain that the smell of her scalp has enough electricity to power the village of myself, her voice a reading lamp, her stomach a power strip, each finger a thousand volts.

sometimes i say it out loud to see if i can still pronounce it. i say it into the mirror. watch the way my mouth wrestles. then i snatch it by the neck and squeeze it till it’s limp, shove it back down to the bottom of the river.

you can tell how much he loves her / by how he sleeps / not at all / not at all / not at all

I am afraid that outside of here is just another here. I am afraid I will spend the rest of my life hoping to build myself in the vision of someone else. What am I, if not yours? What do I do with my hands when they are just hands?