Anna Burns

As regards our friendship, this was the one person I could speak with, the one person I could listen to, totalling in fact the last trusted-fewest person who wouldn’t drain the life out of me that I had left in the world.

I was getting an education on just how much I was impacting people without any awareness I’d been visible to people.

I didn’t know what ma meant by my knowledge of the world. My knowledge of the world consisted of fucking hell, fucking hell, fucking hell, which didn’t lend itself to detail, the detail really being those words themselves.

I came to understand how much I’d been closed down, how much I’d been thwarted into a carefully constructed nothingness by that man. Also by the community, by the very mental atmosphere, that minutiae of invasion.

a recklessness, an abandonment, a rejection of me by me – had returned to me. I was going to die anyway, wouldn’t live long anyway, any day now I’d be dead, all the time, violently murdered – and that, I now understand, gave a certain edge. It offered a different perspective, a freeing-up of the fear option.

Then again, I knew all along it wouldn’t be over. With these sorts of things you have to take each day, each person, each reprisal, at a time.