“It’s even more difficult to talk about you in the past tense because you’re technically still here. Here as in alive, obviously, not here in this house.”—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
“And this, I’ve just now decided, is maybe harder than death. With death there’s no option to call someone, to hear them laugh, to see or touch or hold them again. There’s no decision to be made. No temptation to resist. Choosing to be apart is its own special kind of torture. It means making that choice over and over again. Every moment of every day. And some days the choice doesn’t seem as clear.”—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
“are the moments we remember most actually the moments we remember least?”—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
“No. They’re teeth. Followed by a clump of slimy liquorice hair.”—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
“I’m beginning to realise that time does not heal wounds. Time just adds more days in which to feel the effect of them.”—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
“And we come back like a bunch of eager Christians, jaws slack and tongues raised, ready to receive what someone died to give us. Comfortable with their sacrifice.”—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
“And look, I know how this goes. I know that by the time you get married I’ll have healed enough that I can smile for you too. But this foresight barely makes a dent in the agony of imagining it now. Somehow, each fresh loss feels different, like a maze with shifting walls; I know there’s a way out, but I’m fucked if I can find it.”—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
“The photos elicit in me a feeling akin to that of Maeve’s paintings, or the eerie videos that preceded my most recent nightmare. In them I see no past. No future. Just infinite present. And the threat of something unseen. What that thing is, I can’t tell, but there’s a lack in each one, a romanticised longing. I feel I could fall into them, that even as I stand here now, I am free-falling.”—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
“I have the solipsistic sense that my own inner world, and not Tarkovsky’s, is being projected up there for everyone to see.”—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
“I read over and over this brief exchange, wringing it dry for hidden meaning. And for the next few hours I rest easy knowing where you are, who you’re with, and that I’m on your mind.”—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
“your fingers lifting my mouth to yours, the way we moved together, the bruises on my belly from our hip bones grinding.”—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
“New Year’s Eve finds me staring at an endless loop of liminal spaces: unfinished construction sites, dreamlike swimming pools with no obvious entrance or exit, mono-yellow hallways in some nondescript hotel. I’m reluctant to call it an addiction, but I can no longer go a day without watching these videos, which get me so close to that feeling of falling, and the sense that at any moment the ground will hit and everything will suddenly make sense.”—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
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