Tilt Emma Pattee Quotes

Leave those dishes, I should have said. Come play with me in the forest, I should have said. The world will end tomorrow.

People have done harder things than this. People have been through worse than this. Nobody I know, but still, people.

People will tell you that everything is clear in hindsight, but really it’s just rewritten.

Your father lives for a room of strangers to fall in love with him. He lives to be the man he is in a room full of strangers.

There’s no way to explain to your father that some people make lists of all the ways that babies die and some people don’t.

We fall back into silence. Something like adrenaline starts beating its slow drum inside me. Maybe you’ll know this feeling one day—there’s nothing a woman hates more than walking by herself, and hearing a strange noise, or feeling the presence of an “other,” that horrible sickness all over my body, ground shifting, women are so unsafe, all of us always pretending to be safe, always avoiding any reminder that our safety is upheld only as long as the person closest to us keeps deciding not to kill us.

The problem with so many years spent sitting so close to somebody is that you can tell yourself you’re being seen, but really you’ve disappeared, closed the blinds, nobody’s home.

Wow,” I say, all sweet. It’s a woman thing: the more scared you get, the nicer you have to be.

The happiest people are the ones who want what they already have.

We’re at that stage where we’ve learned to live with our incomprehension of each other. Where it’s easier to nod like, oh yes, I see, than it is to ask for more.

For a second, we’re tilted

Calm down. The least calming words ever.

The ocean is a hoarder, you know. Keeping a collection of tchotchkes down there and then spitting them out, one by one, to remind us that it owns all of us.

You and me, when we die, we’re going to evaporate back into the earth like we were never even here. Bodies made of air, bodies made of dirt.

But hasn’t it always been the other way around? Haven’t I always been flipping channels and browsing Pinterest while people died and struggled and starved?

Lately, time seems to move like that, like as soon as I get my hand firmly around a moment, it has turned to dust and there’s a new moment to try and grasp.

If it’s bad news, I don’t want to know. I want to pause here, in this moment, the moment before I know.

The key to a happy life is wanting what you already have.

Never turn your back on the ocean,” she used to say. “Or a Chihuahua.

I could have been anything. Gone anywhere.

Nobody needs flowers at the end of the world.

It's a woman thing: the more scared you get, the nicer you have to be.

I read somewhere that in the case of a natural disaster, you should not look strangers in the eye in case they die later and you’re forced to eat them. Or maybe it was the opposite. Maybe you’re supposed to look them in the eye and memorize all their clothes so you can tell their families that you saw them. Or maybe that wasn’t natural disasters, that was in case you get raped.

Anyways, our fight: your father got offered a last-minute understudy role in a play, and he wanted to skip work today so he could make rehearsals. And I told him to turn it down, to go to work instead. Because we need the money.

life is this powerful river,

Now that we’re on the overpass, I can feel that it’s tilted slightly

The road in front of us looks wonky, tilted, like everything is sliding sideways.

shrill warble of a baby bird alone in the nest.

star children who forgot to become stars. “It’s getting cold,” he says, holding

couch is like a mother, takes all your weight, asks nothing in return.

And we stare at each other, in that endless slow gaze of two women who are both surprised and not surprised at all to learn a man has lied.

The man you marry is the man you get, my mother used to say. Meaning: men don’t change.

He moved to Portland to escape his childhood, and now he wants to move somewhere else to escape his adulthood.

They say your body can identify a sociopath, because when they speak, you won’t feel anything. You can’t empathize with them or feel their joy or sadness.

Maybe you’ll know this feeling one day—there’s nothing a woman hates more than walking by herself, and hearing a strange noise, or feeling the presence of an “other,” that horrible sickness all over my body, ground shifting, women are so unsafe, all of us always pretending to be safe, always avoiding any reminder that our safety is upheld only as long as the person closest to us keeps deciding not to kill us.

A couch is like a mother, takes all your weight, asks nothing in return.

While washing the dishes, only be washing the dishes—that’s what he always says. Some Buddhism

...there's nothing a woman hates more than walking by herself, and hearing a strange noise, or feeling the presence of an "other," that horrible sickness all over my body, ground shifting, women are so unsafe, all of us always pretending to be safe, always avoiding any reminder that our safety is upheld only as long as the person closest to us keeps deciding not to kill us.

....I rip open a candy bar and chew it twice before swallowing it, drool dripping out of my mouth. Flashlights bouncing off the floors and shelves like strobe lights. I pick up a can of something off a shelf. Blueberry lavender sauce. What the fuck. Throw it back down...

The short version is that nobody told us...that it is words to try and fail than to not try at all. Because when you don't try, you can always imagine the life you could have lived.

The problem with so many years spent sitting so close to somebody is that you can tell yourself you're being seen, but really you've disappeared, closed the blinds, nobody's home.

Lately time seems to move like that, like as soon as I get my hand firmly around a moment, it has turned to dust and there's a new moment to try and grasp.

Wishing he was twenty-two again, with his whole life stretching out in front of him.

It’s like life is this powerful river, of doing laundry and buying groceries and driving to work and scrolling on my phone, and the weekends are so short.

All of my alternate lives, spinning out away from me like Frisbees.

Each year somehow shorter than the year before.

God, give me another chance and I won’t fuck it up.

did not have a mother to go grocery shopping with. I was always looking for some way to spend a Saturday, all those Saturdays collecting in dusty piles around the house. I was constantly tripping over a Saturday that had no purpose and belonged to nobody.

The hardest thing in the world is to see a zit and not pick it. But the only way to get rid of a zit without a scar is to not pick it. There is a whole metaphor for life in there somewhere.

All I know is that your father is a piece of shit and he cannot be dead because I need to tell him, You are a piece of shit.

This position of capsized opportunity, the stench of potential, fermented.

Then, my mother dies. Texts me that she’s sick, that she needs to rest. And never wakes up again. A wave of grief so dark and strong drags me out to sea, strands me underwater for a year, two years, a lifetime.

It occurs to me that we are all very small.

Something like adrenaline starts beating its slow drum inside me. Maybe you’ll know this feeling one day—there’s nothing a woman hates more than walking by herself, and hearing a strange noise, or feeling the presence of an “other,” that horrible sickness all over my body, ground shifting, women are so unsafe, all of us always pretending to be safe, always avoiding any reminder that our safety is upheld only as long as the person closest to us keeps deciding not to kill us.

For as long as I can remember, she made these tiny papier-mâché birds that she molded carefully with her hands and glued on little scraps of wood for the beaks, and twisted thin pieces of wire for the feet and then took this paintbrush that seemed to be just one tiny strand of hair and painted their little delicate faces, and the markings on their beaks and even the round white dots of their eyes. They were all types of birds: sparrows and robins but also tree pipits and magpies and goldfinches. She would spend hours studying each bird, their markings and the roundness of their head, and she knew all the anatomical terms: the mantle and the alula and the plumage and she would point these things out to me on the walks we took together. Why, how, did my mother start making her birds? I don’t know; I never asked.

As long as I can remember, I’d find her at her little crafting desk in the living room, watching Grey’s Anatomy or Desperate Housewives and working on her birds. And so I never asked her why she made birds, and how she learned how to papier-mâché, and who exactly she was making the birds for. And now I can’t ask her any of those things.

I have them, her birds. There are only three of them left. A blue jay and a house finch and a yellow one I don’t know the name of, with his face and beak all black.

And I remember thinking, as I pulled them out, that every part of the bird, each wing, each painted feather, each talon, my mother’s hands had touched. It overwhelmed me so much, that thought, that I spontaneously pressed one of the birds—the house finch—to my face.

watch her until I can’t see her anymore, her yellow shirt fading into the dark hallway as if into the mouth of a great and terrible beast.

At the end of the world, the men with the guns make the rules. We’ve known this forever.

While washing the dishes, only be washing the dishes—that’s what he always says. Some Buddhism shit he read on Instagram. Only a man could say something like that.

I want something more than this. That thought is like a pebble tossed inside a lake, sinking down into darkness. It’s better to forget the things you want but don’t have. The happiest people are the ones who want what they already have. This ache, this ache inside of me, I don’t know how to get rid of it.

the sharp edge of the sentences we say to each other,

Should you really…?” He holds his hands out. This is a thing people do to show they’re not holding weapons, Bean. But this doesn’t mean they’re unarmed. The weapons are just hidden.

The terribleness of it fills my entire body. Not just this moment but all the moments.

Women in Finland probably ride their bikes to the hospital to give birth all the time, bring their newborns home in the basket on the front.

Rage works better than sugar; I forgot that.

After a minute, the pain slips its arms off me and slithers away.

To write realistically about the Cascadia quake, these sources were particularly helpful: Full-Rip 9.0: The Next Big Earthquake in the Pacific Northwest by Sandi Doughton, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why by Amanda Ripley, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit, The Really Big One, Kathryn Schulz’s Pulitzer Prize–winning article in The New Yorker about the Cascadia fault line, the Cascadia Rising Exercise Scenario document put out by the state of Oregon in collaboration with the state of Washington and FEMA, and the Cascadia Earthquake Knowledge Points put out by the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI).

So there we were, sitting in the dark gym of the school near our house, as the geologist lays it out for us: how our entire lives are built on top of the Cascadia subduction zone, which eventually will pop off, causing the largest earthquake ever recorded in North America. Bridges sunk into the river, roads turned into scrambled eggs, entire apartment buildings grabbed by the earth to be digested down under. Power lines split like pieces of dental floss, freeway overpasses cracked, skyscrapers with their knees kicked out from under them, tsunami waves a hundred feet high, wiping out the entire Oregon coastline.

There’s a joke that engineers tell: brick buildings are future patios,” the geologist says. “Brick can’t withstand sideways shaking. And when the walls come down, the roof will follow. That’s why we say, earthquakes don’t kill people—bad buildings kill people.” He pauses, looks around for emphasis. “When the earthquake hits, a thousand schools will collapse.

You can’t imagine anything worse? I want to ask him. Really? Like maybe being the person who has to go through the pain? You don’t think that’s just a little bit worse?

He hates this part of me, the part that goes into a room of strangers and decides that I don’t like any of them, and none of them like me either.

the last day of my mother.

MY MOTHER’S LAST NIGHT

Whatever is about to happen, I don’t want to live it.

So I googled it—how to have a baby in the wilderness—and I found this woman’s video. I thought she’d have good tips if the baby is flipped upside down or you get attacked by a mountain lion halfway through. But she was so full of shit. When she goes into labor, she sends her husband to this beautiful meadowy spot she’s picked out months before and he sets up the big tent and the air mattress and gets the AC blowing and then this bitch rolls up, all authentic-nature-vibes, and has her baby. Probably had the ambulance on speed dial.

Here in the middle space, everything is still possible. Everything still exists.

What does a sunset have to do with you and me? The sun sets everyday over like parking lots and oil fields and prisons and shit.

The man you marry is the man you get, my mother used to say. Meaning: men don’t change. My mother didn’t expect much from men. Not that she was immune to their charms. Men delighted her, fascinated her, the way tourists lean out of the car window to watch a tiger grooming itself in the sun. But nobody’s jumping out of the car for a tiger hug, you know? That was my mother, hands inside the vehicle, hands to herself, men better left sleeping outside in the jungle.

How do I explain a home to you, Bean? We fill them with dirt and dust and dishes and cat hair. Spend all our time looking on big and small screens at other people’s homes, wishing they were ours. Drive to places like IKEA in hopes that our homes will look more like the homes on our screens.

He stares into every city like a wishing well, seeing only the possibility of us having a new life: glamorous friends, better jobs. When I bring up the cost of moving, having to find a new dentist, not finding jobs and moving back to Portland with our tails between our legs, he gets annoyed and then quiet, staring out the car window or back at the TV. Still lost in the fantasy of another city, just without me.

The man I wanted to sleep with wasn’t your father. The man I wanted to sleep with was Jacob, a tall, silky man with eyelashes you could hang your coat on. He smelled so much of heat and cloves that I didn’t have to turn my head to know when he walked into the theatre after a smoke break. Jacob was playing the professor who not so subtly suggests to Heather’s character that she doesn’t need a degree to MAKE ART and that she doesn’t need a man to BE HAPPY. Yes, I know.

The problem, of course, was that Jacob had eyes only for Heather. Heather, with the turtlenecks and the tortoiseshell glasses and the red lipstick, who was always reading Sylvia Plath. Heather, who schooled your father on how to say scrumptious and who was, in every sense of the word, completely scrumptious.

After the show, Heather invited us all to her place for the cast party. I got in my crappy Toyota Camry with the missing door handles and I was driving, thinking that maybe I’d make a move on Jacob, thinking this might be the night everything happens, when I saw your father, standing by the bus stop with his hands in his pockets to keep warm.

Every couple of minutes, I check my pockets for my phone. I can’t help it. It’s like a phantom limb. Without a phone, I’m like an animal without legs. You have to understand about people my age that we got phones before we had sex, we got phones before we got credit cards, before we started therapy, before we started drinking beer and coffee and two-for-one margaritas at the shitty bar down the street. I learned to drive by following the glowing blue arrow wherever it took me.

I hate these appointments. Hate how everyone talks to me like I'm stupid, like I can't think straight, hate how they fawn and coo over me as I lie exposed on the table like an animal to dissect.

You can't imagine anything worse? I want to ask him. Really? Like maybe being the person who has to go through the pain? You don't think that's just a little bit worse? But this is your father's moment. I see that now. I'm just a prop, and props don't speak.

...when somebody offers you more money, you say yes. That is the divine rule of the world, Bean, you should know this now. You always say yes.

Is this life? The thing we were all seeking since those afternoons after school, when we saw Friends on TV and dreamed that one day we would be all grown up and get coffee with friends and hang out on a couch in an apartment. Sometimes it seems like your father and I have spent not just years doing this but eons. An infinite amount of time spent unloading the dishwasher and waiting in line at the grocery store.

This is the natural progression of the artist. At first you think it's only you. Born a star! Then you get out in the world and think, alright, there's a few of us. But just us. Meant to be! And then of course you realize it's not just you and your friends, but everyone. Hundreds of thousands of millions of people. Who want to be stars. Who think they have what it takes.

He loves hot dogs—obsessively loves hot dogs. He'd eat a hot dog every day for the rest of his life if he could. Isn't it funny that this is the kind of information that makes a person unique? That they love to eat a stick of meat in a round bed of bread. Absurd. When you grow up, Bean, maybe you will love trains. Or brussels sprouts. And we will all marvel over this thing that makes you you.

And the glow, the glow of hearing the words that came from inside of you being spoken out loud, of having the things you wrote be listened to and therefore made important.

Summer really is over. In a moment, it'll start raining, then be Christmas, then a whole new year. Lately, time seems to move like that, like as soon as I get my hand firmly around a moment, it has turned to dust and there's a new moment to try and grasp.

Something like adrenaline starts beating its slow drum inside me. Maybe you'll know this feeling one day—there's nothing a woman hates more than walking by herself, and hearing a strange noise, or feeling the presence of an "other," that horrible sickness all over my body, ground shifting, women are so unsafe, all of us always pretending to be safe, always avoiding any reminder that our safety is upheld only as long as the person closest to us keeps deciding not to kill us.

But it's not the beginning; it's the end. It's just coming towards me in slow motion, so I can't make out the shape of it.

It's like life is this powerful river, of doing laundry and buying groceries and driving to work and scrolling on my phone, and the weekends are so short.

A security guard stands in front of the doors, yelling at people to get back. He shoves a woman holding the hands of two boys wearing matching polo shirts, private school uniforms. All the lights in the store are off. The windows shattered. Inside, I can make out the dark hallways of rye bread and non-GMO cereal. At the end of the world, organic food is protected.

Why, how, did my mother start making her birds? I don't know; I never asked. I suppose it was like growing up with a mother who goes to church on Sundays or gets her hair done every two weeks. Why? How? But the child whose mother goes to church on Sundays does not ask those questions, because to that child, it is a perfectly normal thing to do, to go sit on hard benches in a roomful of people discussing the specifics of a fairy tale (yes, I've shown my hand here, I suppose, but sooner or later you and I will have to have this discussion) and then having cookies and coffee afterward and chatting about the weather.

Wow,' I say, all sweet. It's a woman thing: the more scared you get, the nicer you have to be.