Painted Scars Quotes

She had this dark cancer water dripping out of her chest. Eyes closed. Intubated. But her hand was still her hand, still warm and the nails painted this almost black dark blue and I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar.

A pattern of raised crisscrossed scars, some old and white, others more recent in various shades of pink and red. Exposing the stress of the structure underneath its paint

Why the war paint, Pix? Because I can't stand the girl underneath.... "Why the tattoos ?" Because I can't bear seeing the scars of my past.

—except for the fact that your scars mean you’ve been hurting, I am one-hundred-percent cool with having them in the painting. Some models, especially the professional ones, it’s like painting air-brushed people. Give me something raw any day.

Van Houten, I’m a good person but a shitty writer. You’re a shitty person but a good writer. We’d make a good team. I don’t want to ask you any favors, but if you have time – and from what I saw, you have plenty – I was wondering if you could write a eulogy for Hazel. I’ve got notes and everything, but if you could just make it into a coherent whole or whatever? Or even just tell me what I should say differently. Here’s the thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease. I want to leave a mark. But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, “They’ll remember me now,” but (a) they don’t remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion. (Okay, maybe I’m not such a shitty writer. But I can’t pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into constellations.) We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can’t stop pissing on fire hydrants. I know it’s silly and useless – epically useless in my current state – but I am an animal like any other. Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either. People will say it’s sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it’s not sad, Van Houten. It’s triumphant. It’s heroic. Isn’t that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm. The real heroes anyway aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn’t actually invented anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn’t get smallpox. After my PET scan lit up, I snuck into the ICU and saw her while she was unconscious. I just walked in behind a nurse with a badge and I got to sit next to her for like ten minutes before I got caught. I really thought she was going to die, too. It was brutal: the incessant mechanized haranguing of intensive care. She had this dark cancer water dripping out of her chest. Eyes closed. Intubated. But her hand was still her hand, still warm and the nails painted this almost black dark blue and I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar. A nurse guy came in and told me I had to leave, that visitors weren’t allowed, and I asked if she was doing okay, and the guy said, “She’s still taking on water.” A desert blessing, an ocean curse. What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.

Look at me. I put this war paint on, but underneath I’m scarred and scared and horny and tired and love you.

After all this time, she still had not found an end to her grief. It was a dark well, an echoing place into which she’d once cast a stone, sure that it would strike bottom and she would stop hurting. Instead, it just kept falling. She forgot about the stone, forgot about the well, sometimes for days or even weeks at a time. Then she would think Liliyana’s name, or her eye would pause on the little boat painted on her bedroom wall, its two-starred flag frozen in the wind. She’d sit down to write a letter and realize she had no one to write to, and the quiet that surrounded her became the silence of the well, of the stone still falling.

Real power frightens them.' She'd waved at the painted altar piece. 'They want the illusion of it. An image on a wall, silent and safe.

She took my black heart with her the day she left, and if she says no, she can keep it. I’m ruined for anyone else anyway.

No one will be teaching you Russian, but me. Got that?” “Got it, kotik.” I close my eyes and shake my head. “You do not call a Russian pakhan ‘kitten’, Nina. I have an image to uphold here.

You are mine now and I am not letting you go. Ever.

the mural, there were painted lines for the Underground, like scars stretched across the skin of the infected nation. There were wounds and then there were wounds.

Scars paint our stories, they give proof to the battles we’ve survived, the trials we’ve overcome.

Roman?” “Yes?” “I have a confession to make.” I kiss her shoulder. “Something bad?” “Yeah. It’s . . . well, it’s a kind of a problem. A big one.” “Spill it, Nina.” She’s silent for a few moments, and then makes my world tilt on its axis with six short words. “I’m in love with you, Roman.” I close my eyes for a second and squeeze her tightly. It’s like everything around me stopped. “Then we share the same problem, malysh.

How had she ever been so ignorant? How right that the body changed over time, becoming a gallery of scars, a canvas of experience, a testament to life and one's capacity to endure it

If you are very quiet and do not look away, you may see the brightest star in the constellation glow steadily brighter. It brightens until it overwhelms every other star in the sky, brightens until it seems to touch the ground, and then the glow is gone, and in its place is a girl. Her hair and lashes are painted a shifting silver, and a scar crosses one side of her face. She is dressed in Sealand silk and a necklace of sapphire . Some say that, once upon a time, she had a prince, a father, a society of friends. Others say that she was once a wicked queen ,a worker of illusions, a girl who brought darkness across the lands. Stilll others say that she once had a sister, and that she loved her dearly. Perhaps all of these are true. She walks to the boy, tilts her head up at him, and smiles. He bends down to kiss her. Then he helps her onto the horse, and she rides away with him to a faraway place, until they can no longer be seen. These are only rumour,of course, and make little more than a story to tell round a fire. But it is told. And thus they live on. —“The Midnight Star,” a folktale

Tell me, Nina, if there wasn’t this deal between us, would you have come when I nodded?” he asks. “Nope.” I don’t expect him to ask me to elaborate, but he does, and his question surprises me. “Why not? Is it because of the wheelchair?” He says it conversationally, but there is a hidden undertone I can’t quite define. I abandon watching the crowd and look him right in the eyes. “It’s because I’m not a poodle, Mr. Petrov.

Igor speaks only Russian. How can he teach her anything?” “I have no idea. He tells her what to do, and when she does it wrong, he yells.” My head snaps to the side to look at Varya. “He yelled at my wife?” “She yelled at him more.

Put your hands on my wife,” I tell the idiot, “and you’re losing them.

Have you ever stared at a painting so long that the colors blur and you can’t tell what you’re looking at anymore? There’s no form, face, or shape–just color, just swirls of paint? I think people are like that. When you really look at them, you stop seeing a perfect nose or straight teeth. You stop seeing the acne scar or the dimple in the chin. Those things start to blur, and suddenly you see them, the colors, the life inside the shell, and beauty takes on a whole new meaning.

He stares at the cellist, and feels himself relax as the music seeps into him. He watches as the cellist's hair smoothes itself out, his beard disappears. A dirty tuxedo becomes clean, shoes polished bright as mirrors...The building behind the cellist repairs itself. The scars of bullets and shrapnel are covered by plaster and paint, and windows reassemble, clarify and sparkle as the sun reflects off glass. The cobblestones of the road set themselves straight. Around him people stand up taller, their faces put on weight and colour. Clothes gain lost thread, brighten, smooth out their wrinkles. Kenan watches as his city heals itself around him. The cellist continues to play...

Later in my room, I lift up my dress and twist to see the rainbow splotch of lotus on my side. And it occurs to me, what if I stopped hating it? What if the tattoo and the scar and this summer's freckles are my patina? Wabi-Sabi says rust and faded paint hold beauty. So what if I let these marks be passport stamps from where I've been - one's that don't determine a damn thing about where I'm going next?

Even the way he spit was scary. If he hit you with it, it likely would leave a scar. He was intimidating. Physically, the man looked like someone sprayed muscle paint all over his body. Ripped. Flawless.

What’s the difference, really, between Malfoy and heroin? What are they but two shipwrecks, entangled by the same tide? How fucking poetic. He and I are paint splattered all over the place and we’re staining everything and maybe we absolutely don’t go together, but to me — to me we’re a fucking Jackson Pollock.

I am the gilding of the gold I am the painting of the lily I am the crushing of the sand I am the tirading tide of bland I am the taunting silver light which penetrates and scars the sky I am the remnant hopes and dreams of all good men that come to die I am the surgeon’s chromium dagger I am turgid Las Nevadas

I want you to learn that if you don't keep picking at old wounds, over time they will eventually heal. Oh sure, sometimes they will leave a nasty, jagged scar, but at least it won't hurt like it did anymore, and if you don't look at it, sometimes you can almost forget it's there.

Decided to finally get out of your cave, I see.” I cock an eyebrow. “You should get dressed. We’re going down for dinner in thirty minutes.” “Slutty, serious, or something in the middle?” “Middle will work.” “Damn, I wish you picked slutty.

There are only three things people understand in my world: loyalty, money, and death.

The idea of her in my clothes does something to my insides, and I imagine grabbing her and taking her to my bed. I don’t like that at all. This is a business deal and nothing else.

I don’t know what to do to make my fucked-up brain “un-fuck” itself.

When I became convinced that the Universe is natural – that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts, and bars, and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world -- not even in infinite space. I was free -- free to think, to express my thoughts -- free to live to my own ideal -- free to live for myself and those I loved -- free to use all my faculties, all my senses -- free to spread imagination's wings -- free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope -- free to judge and determine for myself -- free to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds, all the "inspired" books that savages have produced, and all the barbarous legends of the past -- free from popes and priests -- free from all the "called" and "set apart" -- free from sanctified mistakes and holy lies -- free from the fear of eternal pain -- free from the winged monsters of the night -- free from devils, ghosts and gods. For the first time I was free. There were no prohibited places in all the realms of thought -- no air, no space, where fancy could not spread her painted wings -- no chains for my limbs -- no lashes for my back -- no fires for my flesh -- no master's frown or threat – no following another's steps -- no need to bow, or cringe, or crawl, or utter lying words. I was free. I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously, faced all worlds. And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers who gave their lives for the liberty of hand and brain -- for the freedom of labor and thought -- to those who fell on the fierce fields of war, to those who died in dungeons bound with chains -- to those who proudly mounted scaffold's stairs -- to those whose bones were crushed, whose flesh was scarred and torn -- to those by fire consumed -- to all the wise, the good, the brave of every land, whose thoughts and deeds have given freedom to the sons of men. And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they had held, and hold it high, that light might conquer darkness still.

Here you are. Still standing. Fierce with the reality of love and loss. Wearing the truth of our hearts on your tattered sleeves. And yes, this one very nearly took you out. And yes, there were days when the darkness was heavy and the climb out of that rabbit hole required you to mine your depths for strength you didn’t even know you had. But here you are. Broken open by hope. Cracked wide by loss. Full of longing and grief and the burn of that phoenix fire. Warrior painted with ashes. Embers from the blaze still clinging to your newborn skin, leaving you forever marked with scars of rebirth. And just look at you. Heart broken but still beating. Arms empty but still open. Face raised to the sky and giving thanks for the light, even when it hurts your eyes. My god, you are beautiful.

It's only because I refused to tear those spattered maps from the study for years, or to allow you to paint over them as you were so anxious to, that Kevin "remembers" the incident at all. He was, as you observed repeatedly at the time, awfully young. 'I kept them p for my sanity,' I said. 'I needed to see something you'd done to me, to reach out and touch it. To prove that your malice wasn't all in my head.' 'Yeah,' he said, tickling the scar on his arm again. 'Know what you mean.

Magnus stopped dead. The room was illuminated only by a reading lamp; all the other light came from outside the windows. Alec was painted with streetlights and moonlight, shadows curling around his biceps and the slender indentations of his collarbones, his torso all smooth, sleek, bare skin until the dark line of his jeans. There were runes on the flat planes of his stomach and the silvery scars of old Marks snaked around his ribs, with one on the ridge of his hip. His head was bowed, his hair black as ink, his luminously pale skin white as paper. He looked like a piece of art, chiaroscuro, beautifully and wonderfully made. Magnus had heard the story of how the Nephilim were created many times. They must have forgotten to leave out the bit that said: And the Angel descended from on high and gave his chosen ones fantastic abs.

I PAINT MY FACE. By Omrane Khuder. Mirror, distorted; I sit, paint my Face, Toxic white Make-up buries my Scars, My Eyes tell lies; Dumbfounded Confidence hides the Disgrace. Place the tragic Vehicle called My Life in to Drive, Sad pathetic Clown; Late for the suppression show, Despair another time; Let the chuckles and defeat derive. I paint my Heart; I hide my True. I paint my Soul; I keep it from You. I paint, I cannot accept; To ignore you the way you ignore Me? I paint my scarred and pitiful Face; No Will left to restore Me. I paint my Face; it’s all I know to do. My painted Face shatters the Mirror, yet still all I see is You.

He picked up the small painting of the frozen forest and examined it again. “I’ve had many lovers,” he admitted. “Females of noble birth, warriors, princesses …” Rage hit me, low and deep in the gut at the thought of them—rage at their titles, their undoubtedly good looks, at their closeness to him. “But they never understood. What it was like, what it is like, for me to care for my people, my lands. What scars are still there, what the bad days feel like.” That wrathful jealousy faded away like morning dew as he smiled at my painting. “This reminds me of it.” “Of what?” I breathed. He lowered the painting, looking right at me, right into me. “That I’m not alone.” I didn’t lock my bedroom door that night.

She painted because she loved to paint. She never exhibited. She had no career, no ambitions for her work except that it be good, and she didn't care what we thought of it.

Who the fuck is Mark?” I jump and spin around to find Roman glaring down at me. “Why do you call him babe?” he demands. “And what kind of photo are you sending him?

He and I are paint splattered all over the place and we’re staining everything and maybe we absolutely don’t go together, but to me — to me we’re a fucking Jackson Pollock.

You’ll be sexy with the cane, Roman. Very aristocratic looking.” His eyes snap up to mine and his lips lift in a smile. “And I’m not sexy now?” Oh, you have no idea how much,

How about a trade, then? You paint something for me, and I give you something you want.” “Anything?” “Money, jewelry, anything you want.

One can grow accustomed to carrying unseeable scars, as if the tattoo one wears is inked in flesh tone over flesh tone; but nevertheless one is still covered in secret, painted with secret, stained by it.

The head of the Russian criminal syndicate. A drug dealer. A killer. And I managed to fall in love with him. Someone please just lock me up in a mental institution, because that’s apparently where I belong.

The tale is told by royalty and vagabonds alike, nobles and peasants, hunters and farmers, the old and the young. The tale comes from ever corner of the world, but no matter where it is told, it is always the same story, A boy on horseback, wandering at night, in the woods or on the plains or along the shores. The sound of a lute drifts in the evening air. Over head are the stars of a clear sky, a sheet of light so bright that he reaches up, trying to touch them. He stops and descends from his horse. Then he waits. He waits until exactly midnight, when the newest constellation in the sky blinks into existence. If you are very quiet and do not look away, you may see the brightest star in the constellation glow steadily brighter. It brightens until it overwhelms every other star in the sky, brightens until it seems to touch the ground, and then the glow is gone, and it its place is a girl. Her hair and lashes are painted a shifting silver, and a scar crosses one side of her face. She is dressed in Sealand silks and a necklace of sapphire. Some say that, once upon a time, she had a prince, a father, a society of friends. Other say that she was once a wicked queen, a worker of illusions, a girl who brought darkness across the lands. Still others say that she once had a sister, and that she loved her dearly. Perhaps all of these are true. She walks to the boy, tilts her head up at him, and smiles. He bends down to kiss her. Then he helps her onto the horse, and she rides away with him to a faraway place, until they can no longer be seen. These are only rumors, of course, and make little more than a story to tell around the fire. But it is told. And thus they live on. --"The Midnight Star", a folktale

Oh, she was so mad.” “Why? Did she want to eat them all by herself?” Varya turns to me, and there is a mischievous and satisfied look in her eyes, like a cat who got the cream. “No, Roman. She was mad because they didn’t leave any for you.

I move to the corner, and Roman lies down on the sofa, places his head in my lap, and closes his eyes. “Does your leg hurt?” “Yes,” he says, but there is a slight delay in his reply. “Are you lying?” “Nope.” He shakes his head. His eyes are still closed, but the corners of his mouth lift a bit. “Oh yes, you are lying.” I bend down slightly. “You just want me to pet you.” He opens his eyes and reaches up to tuck one of the strands that’s escaped my ponytail behind my ear. “Yes,” he says and closes his eyes again.

Would you paint something for me?” I look up at him, surprised by his question. “I don’t do commissions.” “Any particular reason?” “I don’t like to be pressed into doing things I don’t want to do.” Roman’s lips widen in a smile. Yup, he understood the double meaning.

It had maroon paint and exposed brick and scarred wood, and a chalkboard menu about ninety percent full of things that don’t really belong in coffee, like dairy products of various types and temperatures, and weird nut-based flavorings, and many other assorted pollutants.

For a life of the kind you and I have never known and will never know— quiet, peace, the surety of love.” “There is nothing sure about love. Do you think love will protect you when the Fjerdans come to capture the Stormwitch?” She didn’t. But maybe she wanted to believe there was more to life than fear and being feared. She yanked down the shade and tapped the roof. The coach travelled on, up the cramped cart track in slow switchbacks. At last, they rattled to a stop. “Stay here,” she said, hooking his shackles to the seat. She descended from the coach, closing the door behind her. Mal and Alina stood on the sanatorium’s stairs, but when Alina saw Zoya, she smiled and raced down the steps with arms open. Zoya blinked away an embarrassing prickle of tears. She hadn’t known how Alina might greet her, given the circumstances. She let herself be hugged. As always, Ravka’s Saint smelled of paint and pine. “Is he in there?” Alina asked. “He is.” “You bring me the worst gifts.” The tabby had returned from its sojourn and was twining through Misha’s legs. It padded over to Zoya. “Hello, Oncat,” she murmured, hefting the cat into her arms and feeling the comforting rumble of its purr.

He put a hand to the cool, painted stones bearing witness to so many names, so many histories. In the mural, there were painted lines for the Underground, like scars stretched across the skin of the infected nation. There were wounds and then there were wounds. Some were so great Memphis had no idea how they could ever be healed.

Even though I expected her to say no, for some reason, her reply stings.

If I had to pick one word to describe the Russian pakhan it would be devastating.

You like it?” “No.” “Why?” “I’m not a fan of large things,

No holding my wrists or squeezing my neck.” She says, and I feel the cold rush down my spine. “Also, no pinning me down with your body.

His lips are so soft, and for a moment I’m distracted by the sight of him watching me with such intensity. He’s so beautiful.

If anyone dares to disrespect my wife, they will not like the consequences

You have a foot fetish, Roman?” “No. But it looks like I’m developing one,

You are a dangerous woman, malysh.” “What does that mean?” “Malysh? It’s a term of endearment. It means little one.

It’s rather hard to scratch a diamond.” Nina looks at me, blinks, then looks down at the ring like it’s going to bite her. “This thing is real?” “Of course it’s real.

Are you trying to kiss me, Roman?” I whisper into his lips. “I might be,” he says. “There’s no one around to see us.” “Exactly,” he whispers and touches his lips to mine.

I made you something.” I look up from my desk and find Nina’s head peeking around the door. “Did you burn it?

Everyone has to start somewhere,' he says, his eyes dark and smoldering, his fingers seeking the scar on my face. The one on my forehead. The one that's hidden under my bangs. The one he has no way of knowing about. 'Even Picasso had a teacher.' He smiles, withdrawing his hand and the warmth that came with it, returning to his painting, as I remind myself to breathe.

3 A.M. SAINTS It is 3 a.m. again and you are showing me all of your sins by holding up your scars to the starless sky. Painting the entire universe with gold and clothing my velvet heart in purple - we become saints within those unholy hours close to dawn. Still, the world is spinning - even though it feels a little slower now - while the silence carries us away into the next day.

But I know she has eyes like the moon. I know the faded scar that nicks her eyebrow. Once again the divîner's face floods my mind with such clarity it could be a painting hung on the palace wall.

Would you paint something for me?” I look up at him, surprised by his question. “I don’t do commissions.” “Any particular reason?” “I don’t like to be pressed into doing things I don’t want to do.

I googled you yesterday,” he says, still keeping my fingers in his hand, just an inch from his lips. “Who would have thought that such a delicate little hand could create such . . . disturbing art.

Do you have any idea what it does to me, feeling you go still with fear beneath me, watching the panic in your eyes? It guts me every time. Please don’t ask me to keep hurting you. I can’t bear it.

The rings are a nice touch, though. I don’t know how Roman managed to find the wedding rings so fast. He probably went to a jewelry store while I was waiting with Vova and Dimitri in the car. I also got a second ring—a thick white gold band with a pale rock in the middle, which I suppose will pose as an engagement ring. It’s probably fake, because the real deal would cost a fortune. I like it anyway.

Now we wait for the maid to catch us cuddling.” “But we’re not doing that, are we? You’re just sitting in my lap.” Reaching with my hand, I move a long black strand of hair that’s fallen over her face, then holding her at the nape, lean in and place a kiss on her slender neck. With my other hand I find the slit of her dress and hear her sharp intake of breath when I start moving my fingers up her naked thigh.

We danced on broken glasses, painting a bloody masterpiece on the floor. The painful it got, the harder we danced. We didn't care about scars because it was us, dancing on broken glasses - with each other.

Even when I’m caught off guard by a lathery shade of peach on the bottom corner of a painting at the Met, as if being reminded that I haven’t seen all the colors, and how there’s more to see, and how one color’s newness can invalidate all of my sureness. To experience infinity and sometimes too the teasing melancholy born from the smallest breakthroughs, like an unanticipated shade of peach, like Buster Keaton smiling, or my friend Doreen’s laugh—how living and opposite of halfhearted it is. Or my beautiful mother growing out her gray, or a lightning bolt’s fractal scarring on a human body, or Fantin-Latour’s hollyhocks, or the sound of someone practicing an instrument—the most sonically earnest sound. Or how staring at ocean water so blue, it leaves me bereft. In postcards, I’ll scribble “So blue!” because, what else?

I close my eyes for a second and squeeze her tightly. It’s like everything around me stopped. “Then we share the same problem, malysh.” I say into her neck, and feel her go still next to me. When I raise my head and look at her, her lips are slightly quivering, and there are tears in the corners of her eyes. “That six-month deal? It’s off, Nina,” I say and squeeze her waist. “I don’t care what we agreed. You’re mine now and I’m not letting you go. Ever.

At that moment Nina raises her head, our gazes connect, and she smiles at me. It’s like the sun has suddenly broken through the dark clouds, hitting me with its warmth, and I find myself wishing this was real and not just an act.

He is testing his body in the wind, feeling the weight and breadth of it. My heart is a new bird throwing itself against the space he is taking up. There are no long-legged white girls around us, no pale, over-cologned boys snicker-flirting with the bartender. Instead, all around us, there are brown and Black bodies marked with glow paint and tattoos. There are micro-minis and leather short-shorts and calf-length dresses in pleated faux silk atop unshaven legs. There are bodies with breasts, with thights, with scars, with canes; wearing high heels, wearing high tops; large bodies, small bodies, bodies that twirl and shake and fill the room. This is not dancing, but a becoming of winged creatures.

In some of the early northern European paintings, Christ looks like you flushed him out from under a bridge, but in Sunday-school books and the sorts of pictures they sell at Christian supply stores, he falls somewhere between Kenny Loggins and Jared Leto, always doe-eyed and, of course, white, with brown—not black—hair, usually wavy. And he always has a fantastic body, shown at its best on the cross, which—face it—was practically designed to make a man's stomach and shoulders look good. What would happen, I often wonder, if someone sculpted a morbidly obese Jesus with titties and acne scars, and hair on his back? On top of that, he should be short—five foot two at most. "Sacrilege!" people would shout. But why? Doing good deeds doesn't make you good-looking.

Loneliness is not supposed to induce empathy, but like Wojnarowicz’s diaries and Klaus Nomi’s voice, that painting of Warhol was one of the things that most medicated my own feelings of loneliness, giving me a sense of the potential beauty present in a frank declaration that one is human and as such subject to need. So much of the pain of loneliness is to do with concealment, with feeling compelled to hide vulnerability, to tuck ugliness away, to cover up scars as if they are literally repulsive. But why hide? What’s so shameful about wanting, about desire, about having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness? Why this need to constantly inhabit peak states, or to be comfortably sealed inside a unit two, turned inward from the world at large?

jump and spin around to find Roman glaring down at me. “Why do you call him babe?” he demands. “And what kind of photo are you sending him?” I blink at him and take a bite of my apple. “My pimp. All of us girls call him babe. And I’m sending a photo of my boobs.

If you are an Aboriginal person in Australia, he writes, “you perform and display the paint and feathers, the pretty bits of your culture, and talk about your unique connection to the land while people look through glass boxes at you, but you are not supposed to look back, or describe what you see.

Tell me!” Cecily insisted later, shaking Colby by both arms. “Cut it out, you’ll dismember me,” Colby said, chuckling. She let go of the artificial arm and wrapped both hands around the good one. “I want to know. Listen, this is my covert operation. You’re just a stand-in!” “I promised I wouldn’t tell.” “You promised in Lakota. Tell me in English what you promised in Lakota.” He gave in. He did tell her, but not Leta, what was said, but only about the men coming to the reservation soon. “We’ll need the license plate number,” she said. “It can be traced. “Oh, of course,” he said facetiously. “They’ll certainly come here with their own license plate on the car so that everyone knows who they are!” “Damn!” He chuckled at her irritation. He was about to tell her about his alternative method when a big sport utility vehicle came flying down the dirt road and pulled up right in front of Leta’s small house. Tate Winthrop got out, wearing jeans and a buckskin jacket and sunglasses. His thick hair fell around his shoulders and down his back like a straight black silk curtain. Cecily stared at it with curious fascination. In all the years she’d known him, she’d very rarely seen his hair down. “All you need is the war paint,” Colby said in a resigned tone. He turned the uninjured cheek toward the newcomer. “Go ahead. I like matching scars.” Tate took off the dark glasses and looked from Cecily to Colby without smiling. “Holden won’t tell me a damned thing. I want answers.” “Come inside, then,” Cecily replied. “We’re attracting enough attention as it is.

A painting walks into the room supported by the collector. It is the painting of a nude by a contemporary artist. She is scarred by shadows from venetian blinds. “The ritual scarification of light and shadow,” I say. But am thinking, silently, the female nude is the self-ironization of the male. She, in his shadow, by design.

I realized I still had my eyes shut. I had shut them when I put my face to the screen, like I was scared to look outside. Now I had to open them. I looked out the window and saw for the first time how the hospital was out in the country. The moon was low in the sky over the pastureland; the face of it was scarred and scuffed where it had just torn up out of the snarl of scrub oak and madrone trees on the horizon. The stars up close to the moon were pale; they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon. It called to mind how I noticed the exact same thing when I was off on a hunt with Papa and the uncles and I lay rolled in blankets Grandma had woven, lying off a piece from where the men hunkered around the fire as they passed a quart jar of cactus liquor in a silent circle. I watched that big Oregon prairie moon above me put all the stars around it to shame. I kept awake watching, to see if the moon ever got dimmer or if the stars got brighter, till the dew commenced to drift onto my cheeks and I had to pull a blanket over my head. Something moved on the grounds down beneath my window — cast a long spider of shadow out across the grass as it ran out of sight behind a hedge. When it ran back to where I could get a better look, I saw it was a dog, a young, gangly mongrel slipped off from home to find out about things went on after dark. He was sniffing digger squirrel holes, not with a notion to go digging after one but just to get an idea what they were up to at this hour. He’d run his muzzle down a hole, butt up in the air and tail going, then dash off to another. The moon glistened around him on the wet grass, and when he ran he left tracks like dabs of dark paint spattered across the blue shine of the lawn. Galloping from one particularly interesting hole to the next, he became so took with what was coming off — the moon up there, the night, the breeze full of smells so wild makes a young dog drunk — that he had to lie down on his back and roll. He twisted and thrashed around like a fish, back bowed and belly up, and when he got to his feet and shook himself a spray came off him in the moon like silver scales. He sniffed all the holes over again one quick one, to get the smells down good, then suddenly froze still with one paw lifted and his head tilted, listening. I listened too, but I couldn’t hear anything except the popping of the window shade. I listened for a long time. Then, from a long way off, I heard a high, laughing gabble, faint and coming closer. Canada honkers going south for the winter. I remembered all the hunting and belly-crawling I’d ever done trying to kill a honker, and that I never got one. I tried to look where the dog was looking to see if I could find the flock, but it was too dark. The honking came closer and closer till it seemed like they must be flying right through the dorm, right over my head. Then they crossed the moon — a black, weaving necklace, drawn into a V by that lead goose. For an instant that lead goose was right in the center of that circle, bigger than the others, a black cross opening and closing, then he pulled his V out of sight into the sky once more. I listened to them fade away till all I could hear was my memory of the sound.

Well, it looks like there are things no amount of money can buy.” “Yeah. That sucks. At least you can buy a wife.” I shrug. “For three million you could have gotten a whole harem, not just one.” Roman cocks his head to the side, observing me with interest, and then leans in to whisper in my ear. “You, Nina Grey, are one strange woman.

The shop across the light from the pay phone was representative. It had maroon paint and exposed brick and scarred wood, and a chalkboard menu about ninety percent full of things that don’t really belong in coffee, like dairy products of various types and temperatures, and weird nut-based flavorings, and many other assorted pollutants.

And then he left the palace to roam the streets of Ombria, where he painted shadows as he searched for light within them, painted thick, barred doors, as he searched in their hewn, scarred grains for what it was they hid, painted high windowless walls as if, rebuilding them stone by stone on paper, he could dismantle them and finally see the secret life behind the real.

He made her feel guapa and wanted and safe, and no one had ever done that for her. No one. On their nights together he would pass his hand over her naked body, Narcissus strokeing that pool of his, murmuring, Guapa, guapa, over and over again. (He didn't care about the burn scars on her back: It looks like a painting of a ciclón and that's what you are, mi negrita, una tormenta en la madrugada.)

I want an answer to a question,” I say. “Is that an option as well?” My choice surprises him. I see it in the way his eyes widen slightly. And he’s not happy. “Depends on the question.” “In that case, I’ll have to decline, Mr. Petrov.” He looks at me and then bursts out laughing, making several heads turn in our direction. “You drive a hard bargain, Miss Grey.” He leans his head and whispers in my ear, “Ask.

You are not in love with Rinaldo Damiani whose hair smells like Sunday morning in the sun, you do not even know him, he doesn’t know you. You can rest your hands on the scars of his shoulders and long to rid him of every breath of pain and still, you will not be in love with him, because this isn’t love. Love is a home and a mortgage and the promise of permanence; love is measured and paced, and this, the too-hasty sprint of your pulse, that’s drugs. You know drugs, don’t you, Charlotte? Euphoria can be bottled, it can be smoked, it will dissolve on your tongue and burn through the vacant cavity of your empty fucking chest. His hands on you, that can be preserved, it can be painted, it can be committed to the canvas of your imagination, and it can stay in the vaults of your private longings, your little reveries, your twisted dreams.

The rape and exploitation of enslaved black women was not just rampant, it was endemic. The writings of former slaves such Harriet Jacobs, as well those of sympathetic white women like abolitionist Sarah Grimké, paint a picture of black girls in their early teens getting routinely bribed with presents and “favors,” such as promises of better treatment, for agreeing to sex with white plantation workers or relatives of the owner.

... the result is a coffee shop on every block, and a four-figure annual tab for a serious enthusiast. The shop across the light from the pay phone was representative. It had maroon paint and exposed brick and scarred wood, and a chalkboard menu about ninety percent full of things that don't really belong in coffee, like dairy products of various types and temperatures, and weird nut-based flavorings, and many other assorted pollutants.

There was no solace in the openness of the land, just as there was no healing in the isolation he sought in the barren plain of winter-killed grasses. The prairie seemed nothing more than an extension of the boundless emptiness that had opened inside him. Neither his mount nor his packhorse seemed a companion—but victims of his own aimlessness. The voiceless plain only provided a silent space for his demons to follow and murmur in his ear. Rilla’s bloodied body shadowed him as vividly as if dragged behind his horse on a travois, scraping a scar across the dry land. The child was not real. There were no memories attached to a nameless son to haunt him, save the mental picture of that inanimate thing tucked against its dead mother’s ribs. The child had seemed more an extension of Rilla’s suffering, giving her death a measurable size and shape. Mother and son comprised a common image rendered in scarlet, and the image had been painted on a permanent altar inside Wyatt’s mind.

I looked around for that welcoming light I'd heard about, but I didn't see it. Instead, everything around me seemed to glow and shimmer in the sunlight. I heard beautiful sounds-not the voices of dead loved ones, but the laughter and singing of my children when they were tiny. I saw James, young and shirtless, chasing them through Mama's garden. Off in the distance I saw Barbara Jean and Clarice, and even myself when we were kids, dancing to music pouring out of my old pink and violet portable record player. Here I was with my fingers brushing up against the frame of the picture I'd been painting for the last fifty-five years, and my beautiful, scarred husband, my happy children, and my laughing friends were right there with me.

STAINS With red clay between my toes, and the sun setting over my head, the ghost of my mother blows in, riding on a honeysuckle breeze, oh lord, riding on a honeysuckle breeze. Her teeth, the keys of a piano. I play her grinning ivory notes with cadenced fumbling fingers, splattered with paint, textured with scars. A song rises up from the belly of my past and rocks me in the bosom of buried memories. My mama’s dress bears the stains of her life: blueberries, blood, bleach, and breast milk; She cradles in her arms a lifetime of love and sorrow; Its brilliance nearly blinds me. My fingers tire, as though I've played this song for years. The tune swells red, dying around the edges of a setting sun. A magnolia breeze blows in strong, a heavenly taxi sent to carry my mother home. She will not say goodbye. For there is no truth in spoken farewells. I am pregnant with a poem, my life lost in its stanzas. My mama steps out of her dress and drops it, an inheritance falling to my feet. She stands alone: bathed, blooming, burdened with nothing of this world. Her body is naked and beautiful, her wings gray and scorched, her brown eyes piercing the brown of mine. I watch her departure, her flapping wings: She doesn’t look back, not even once, not even to whisper my name: Brenda. I lick the teeth of my piano mouth. With a painter’s hands, with a writer’s hands with rusty wrinkled hands, with hands soaked in the joys, the sorrows, the spills of my mother’s life, I pick up eighty-one years of stains And pull her dress over my head. Her stains look good on me.

There’s also the human urge to make things, to paint cave walls and doodle in the margins of to-do lists. Doi once said, “I have to keep on working, otherwise nothing will be brought into existence.” But sometimes I feel like the paper is better before we get ahold of it, when it is still wood. Other times, I love the marks we leave. They feel like gifts and signs, like trail markers in the wilderness. I know we’ve left scars everywhere, and that our obsessive desire to make and have and do and say and go and get—six of the seven most common verbs in English—may ultimately steal away our ability to be, the most common verb in English. Even though we know that none of our marks will truly last, that time is coming not just for all of us but for all we make, we can’t stop scribbling, can’t stop seeking relief wherever we can find it.

GOD I am ready for you to come back. Whether in a train full of dying criminals or on the gleaming saddle of a locust, you are needed again. The earth is a giant chessboard where the dark squares get all the rain. On this one the wet is driving people mad—the bankers all baying in the woods while their markets fail, a florist chewing up flowers to spit mouthfuls here and there as his daughter’s lungs seize shut from the pollen. There is a flat logic to neglect. Sweet nothings sour in the air while the ocean hoots itself to sleep. I live on the skull of a giant burning brain, the earth’s core. Sometimes I can feel it pulsing through the dirt, though even this you ignore. The mind wants what it wants: daily newspapers, snapping turtles, a pound of flesh. The work I’ve been doing is a kind of erasing. I dump my ashtray into a bucket of paint and coat myself in the gray slick, rolling around on the carpets of rich strangers while they applaud and sip their scotch. A body can cause almost anything to happen. Remember when you breathed through my mouth, your breath becoming mine? Remember when you sang for me and I fell to the floor, turning into a thousand mice? Whatever it was we were practicing cannot happen without you. I thought I saw you last year, bark wrapped around your thighs, lurching toward the shore at dawn. It was only mist and dumb want. They say even longing has its limits: in a bucket, an eel will simply stop swimming long before it starves. Wounded wolves will pad away from their pack to die lonely and cold. Do you not know how scary it can get here? The talons that dropped me left long scars around my neck that still burn in the wind. I was promised epiphany, earth- honey, and a flood of milk, but I will settle for anything that brings you now, you still-hungry mongrel, you glut of bone, you, scentless as gold.

somewhere there is a women in China holding a black umbrella so she won’t taste the salt of the rain when the sky begins to weep, there is a 17 year old girl who smells like pomegranates and has summer air tight on her naked skin, wrapping around her scars like veins in a bloody garden, who won’t make it past tomorrow, there is a young man, who buys yellow flowers for the woman in apartment 84B, who learned braille when he realized she couldn’t read his poetry about her white neck and mint eyes there are people watching films, making love for the first time, opening mail with the heading of ‘i miss you’, cooking noodles with organic spices and red sauces, buying lemon detergent, ignoring ‘do not smoke’ signs, painting murals of his lips in abandoned warehouses, chewing the words ‘i love you’ over and over again, swallowing phone numbers and forgotten birthdays, eating strawberry pies, drinking white wine off of each others open mouths, ignoring the telephone, reading this poem somewhere someone is thinking i’m alone somewhere someone finally understands they never really were

When she started with the first empty canvas, she didn’t know what she was going to paint, she just let her paint brushes glide and they religiously followed the trajectory of her angst; the choice of colours and the strokes, they were all a reflection of what was going through her mind. The reds were the embers within her that refused to die. The blues were the rare instances when she was spent by her grief. The blacks were her moments of absolute weakness, the colour of the bottomless pit within her that she had plunged into, falling through and through. The brush strokes moved around blank canvases like snakes with fangs of elixir that filled her scars with a deluge of hope and a gale of faith in herself. The colours spoke to her in whispers, narrating their own tale while she poured out hers to them. They allowed her to channel her life through them. They listened. They cared. They laughed. They cried. They reassured her that there was life waiting ahead, staring at her past, urging her forward with eager arms. And Preeti rushed into them with her brush in hand that rose along with her and fell along with her.

One Tree Hill" We turn away to face the cold, enduring chill As the day begs the night for mercy, love A sun so bright it leaves no shadows Only scars carved into stone on the face of earth The moon is up and over One Tree Hill We see the sun go down in your eyes You run like a river on to the sea You run like a river runs to the sea And in the world, a heart of darkness, a fire-zone Where poets speak their heart then bleed for it Jara sang, his song a weapon in the hands of love You know his blood still cries from the ground It runs like a river runs to the sea It runs like a river to the sea I don't believe in painted roses or bleeding hearts While bullets rape the night of the merciful I'll see you again when the stars fall from the sky And the moon has turned red over One Tree Hill We run like a river runs to the sea We run like a river to the sea And when it's rainin', rainin' hard That's when the rain will break a heart Rainin', rainin' in your heart Rainin' in your heart Rainin', rain into your heart Rainin', rainin', rainin' Rain into your heart Rainin', ooh, rain in your heart, yeah Feel it Oh great ocean Oh great sea Run to the ocean Run to the sea U2, The Joshua Tree (1987)

Forgiveness is difficult,” she said, making me feel small-hearted and brittle. “You don’t have to trust Adam again, not right away, but it does mean you have to accept what’s happened and start to take steps away from the infidelity.” So once again, the burden is on me. Planning the wedding, though it was a genuine joy, was on me. Once we figured out why we couldn’t get pregnant, the burden was on me, too, with those horrible shots that made me so hormonal I had to go into the bathroom at work and cry, and everyone knew and was so nice, which made me cry more. All Adam had to do was switch to wearing boxers and have more sex. The pregnancy—me again. I’m the one with a four-inch scar and a pooch of skin. The house decorating, painting, hiring people to overhaul the plumbing and electric… me. His mother’s birthday—also mine to remember. Holidays, vacations, weekend plans, all mine. And while I would never call my girls a burden, the huge responsibility of raising them is 99 percent mine. And now the future of our marriage is on me. I have to forgive him. I have to accept his apology. I have to get past this. That first night, I lay stiffly next to him. He gave me a meaningful basset-hound look and said, “Thank you, Rachel,” and it was all I could do not to flip him off.

Last night I undressed for bed. But instead of crawling between the sheets I decided to stand, naked, in front of the large full-length mirror that is propped against the wall next to my bed. ⠀ ⠀ I turned off the bright lights, and found a song that spoke to the energy I could feel under my skin. For a while I just stood there. And I looked at myself. Bare skin. Open Heart. Clear truth. ⠀ ⠀ It's a wonder, after 42 years on earth, to allow it to fully land, this knowing that I can stop, and look at myself and think things other than unkind words. ⠀ ⠀ Don't get me wrong. I don't want to paint you a pretty social media picture that doesn't play out in real life. I'm not suddenly completely fine with all that is. I'm human and I'm a woman in the midst of this particular culture, and so of course I'd love to be tighter and firmer and lifted. I'd love to have the skin and metabolism I did in my twenties. I wish, often, that my stomach were flatter. I wear makeup and I dye away my gray hair. I worry about these things too, of course I do. ⠀ ⠀ But finally, and fully - I can stand and look at myself and be filled, completely, with love. I can look at myself entirely bare and think, yes, I like myself now. Just as I am. Even if nothing changes. This me. She is good. And she is beautiful. ⠀ ⠀ And even in the space of allowing myself to be human, and annoyed with those things I view as imperfections, I honor and celebrate this shift. ⠀ ⠀ And so last night I was able to stand there. Naked and unashamed and run my own hands gently along my own skin. To offer the tenderness of the deepest seduction. To practice being my own best lover, to romance my own soul. To light the candles and buy the flowers. To hold space for my own knowing. ⠀ ⠀ And to touch my own skin while the music played. Gently. Lightly. With reverence. My thighs, my arms, my breasts, my belly, the points where my pulse makes visible that faint movement that proves me alive. To trace the translucent blue veins, the scars, the ink that tells stories. To whisper to the home of my own desire. ⠀ ⠀ I love you. ⠀ I respect your knowing. ⠀ Thank you for waiting for me to get here. ⠀ I finally see that you are holy.

He recognized her deft hand and eye for detail immediately. He flipped through the pages, past vignettes of the dairymaid and her vague-featured gentleman engaged in a courtship of sorts: a kiss on the hand, a whisper in the ear. By the book’s midpoint, the chit’s voluminous petticoats were up around her ears, and the illustrations comprised a sequence of quite similar poses in varying locales. Not just the dairy, but a carriage, the larder, in a hayloft lit with candles and strewn with…were those rose petals? I’ll be damned. Gray was fast divining the true source of the French painting master’s mythic exploits. More unsettling by far, however, as he perused the book, he noted a subtle alteration in the gentleman lover’s features. With each successive illustration, the hero appeared taller, broader in the shoulders, and his hair went from a cropped style to collar length in the space of two pages. The more pages Gray turned, the more he recognized himself. It was unmistakable. She’d used him as the model for these bawdy illustrations. She’d sketched him in secret; not once, but many times. And here he’d nearly gone mad with envy over each scrap of foolscap she’d inked for once crewman or another. His emotions underwent a dizzying progression-from surprised, to flattered, to (with the benefit of one especially inventive situation in an orchard) undeniably aroused. But as he lingered over a nude study of this amalgam of the real him and some picaresque fantasy, he began to feel something else entirely. He felt used. She’d rendered his form with astonishing accuracy, given that it must have been drawn before she’d any opportunity to actually see him unclothed. Not that she’d achieved an exact likeness. Her virgin’s imagination was rather generous in certain aspects and somewhat stinting in others, he noted with a bitter sort of amusement. But she’d laid him bare in these pages, without his knowledge or consent. God, she’d even drawn his scars. All in service of some adolescent erotic fantasy. And now he began to grow angry. He had been handling the leaves of the book with his fingertips only, anxious he might smudge or rip the pages. Now he abandoned all caution and flipped roughly through the remainder of the volume. Until he came to the end, and his hand froze. There they were, the two of them. He and she fully clothed and unengaged in any physical intimacies-yet intimate, in a way he had never known. Never dreamed. Sitting beneath a willow tree, his head in her lap. One of her hands lay twined with his, atop his chest. The other rested on his brow. The sky soared vast and expansive above, gauzy clouds spinning into forever. The hot fist of desire that had gripped his loins loosened, moved upward through his torso, churning the contents of his gut along the way. Then it clutched at his heart and squeezed until it hurt. Somehow, this illustration was the most dismaying of all. So naïve, so ridiculous. at least the bawdy situations were plausible, if sometimes physically improbable. This was utterly impossible. To her, he'd never been more than a fantasy. It occurred to Gray that more secrets might be packed within these trunks. If he sorted through her belongings, he might find the answers to all his questions. Perhaps answers to questions he'd never thought to ask. In spite of this, he let the lid of the trunk clap shut and fastened the strap with shaking fingers. He'd suffered as many of her fantasies as he could bear for one day. It was time to acquaint her with reality.