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Catherine Lacey Biography

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“My body felt like tangled rubber bands and dried-out pens and sticky paper clips, like the contents of a drawer where you put the things you don't have anywhere else to put, and I knew that the mind and body are connected, and that my bodily sensations were just messages from my mind, but I just wished there was a box or a drawer or a hole in the ground where I could put all this, all this mind and body stuff that I didn't know what else to do with.”

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“He was looking at me like I was a very nice thing of his that wasn't working quite like it should, like he'd found a defect, a defect that was extremely disappointing because he had spent a lot of time doing his research and believed he had gotten a thing that was guaranteed against these kinds of defects, and maybe there was some kind of glitch in the system and maybe he needed to have a professional assess the situation, give him an estimate.”

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“I leaned back across the table and shut my eyes and thought that at some point in the future, long after humanity had run its course, after some other creature had replaced us, maybe, or maybe even after the next creatures had been replaced by whatever came after them, at some point in a future I could not fully imagine, a question might occur in some mind, and that question might be What was the human? What was the world of the human? - though it would be in some unforeseen language, perhaps a language that was without sound, perhaps a language that did not have to grow from a damp, contaminated mouth - and if this question ever did arise in that future being's mind, would it even be possible to catalog and make sense of all our griefs, our pains and wars? Our delineations? Our need for order? The question arose then - did all this human trouble begin in our bodies, these failing things, weaker or stronger, lighter or darker, taller or shorter? Why did they cause so much trouble for us? Why did we use them against one another? Why did we think the content of a body meant anything?”

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“No one is anything more than a slow event and I knew I was not a woman but a series of movements, not a life, but a shake, and this put a knot in my throat and a pause in my breathing and it turned in my stomach, to know that my stomach was not a stomach but a turn and my breath was nothing if it did not move and my throat without voice was just some slowly decaying meat but I had nothing to say anymore, not yet, and BELINDA refilled my coffee and the surface rolled and rippled and then it almost stilled but not quite because it shook as it will always shake and I watched it keep shaking.”

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“He wouldn't tell me that I always have two options—You can choose how you feel or you you can let your feelings choose you because maybe it is true that those were the options that my husband had, but I knew I didn't have those options and I hated for someone to tell me that I had options I didn't have because I knew that my mind was a small object for sale and my feelings could pick me up and own me and maybe my husband was too expensive for feelings to choose him, to pick him up and have him rung up and scanned and bagged and taken along with those feelings, feelings of I can't really get out of bed today and Husband, would you please not talk to me for the rest of the year. I, too often, had my face smashed against concrete curbs of Ruby, memories of Ruby, the way her face had looked that afternoon as she curled in that chair by the window and the light streaming in and the dark streaming out and what happened so soon after—I went around hostage to those memories, an invisible person following me with a gun barrel to my back.”

MemoriesDepressionThoughtsMetaphorMental IllnessLack Of UnderstandingStream Of ConsciousnessPatronizingCatherine LaceyBad AdviceNobody Is Ever Missing
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“Every few minutes or so I would remember the look from the man who had wanted fifty cents, and I'd look at that framed memory hanging in myself and it meant I was here, back in this sick city, but in other ways I was not here at all and anyone who looked closely could see that I had nothing to give, that I was a junk drawer, a collection of things that may or may not have had a use.”

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“(...) lost in the idea of a disembodied world, one where ideas could hold other ideas, where thoughts could see other thoughts and death couldn’t end thoughts, where one remained alive by thinking, and was not alive if not thinking. Somehow our bodies wouldn’t hold us back the way they do here. Somehow our bodies wouldn’t determine our lives, the lives of others, the ways in which one life could or could not meet the life of another. We would not have to sleep or slam doors or exist in these cells that eat other cells and die anyway, these cells we live in.”

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