And so it is sometimes when I sing that the notes come from me as if I believed I could reach them where they rest, they sure of a reunion I still ca… - Alexander Chee

I was told I was talented. I don't know that it did much except make me lazy when I should have worked harder.

If anything, I was proud of it. I had endured I told myself. I was so strong. But this is not strength. It is only endurance. A kind of emotional or therapeutic anorexia. I was not strong. Or if I was, it was the adrenaline of the wounded. I was really only broken, moving through the landscape as if I were not, and taking all my pride in believing I was passing as whole.

Nothing to fear from a fate that was already yours, then, except, perhaps, that it would never leave you.