Aliya Whiteley

Language is changing, like the earth, like the sea

I find this to be the strangest of expressions – how does one fit in to other people, all edges erased, making a seamless life from the sharp corners of discontent?

To have someone who tells you what to do – sometimes this seems like a bad thing, and sometimes it doesn’t. Is anything forever? I’m thinking not

He told me diseases are like people. They fight and fight and throw themselves around to escape the walls of tighter and tighter boxes

Stories are as slippery as seasons; it’s beyond my power to make either stand still. I try to tell them the same way, but each telling leads to small changes; something is added to the structure, a change of pace, a tweak of testimonies, all of them make circles in our minds

I am not the only one who will miss those quiet mounds, even though the men say: I see Cathy in the stars, not at a graveside, or Sandra’s body is not important. It never was, so it makes no difference where it lies. They say these things reasonably with their logical heads while their hearts lead them to the graveyard to sit, to place their pebbles.

‘Sometimes,’ says Ben, as he stands and stretches out his old muscles, ‘you think too much.’

‘Thank you,’ I tell him again

Our paths never cross there and I would not want them to. Grief is better alone. It has a cleaner taste, a sharper edge, that way

Some of us are born to be free on the wings of imagination and some of us are held down by the chains of reality, isn’t that right? No doubt you’d find a better way of saying that. I do the groundwork so you can have your head in the clouds.

I talked for hours, and people listened because they hated the silence too. They were happy to create it, and then terrified by what they made. And so I came to understand the split at the root of the soul of all men