A neon-pink 3 flickered and instantly disappeared again into the dark. The sight of it on my own device now made me sick. I held my finger down on the menu screen; each little app logo began to vibrate. I deleted the 3. Furthermore, I contemplated deleting everything. Cleaning it all away. The idea had a charm, a self-cancellation, many little suicides, a way to dispatch myself without actually going anywhere.

— Olivia Sudjic

At first, sending the confession by real mail had felt like a genius device. I would not have to sit by my phone and watch for the signs that indicated it had been sent and seen. Slim but solid paper would, I hoped, convey me better. Now I had to consider the very real frailties of the system. Ludicrous, in fact, to entrust something of such magnitude to a mailman. A perfect stranger. I looked up stories of nefarious New York mailmen. There was one who has willfully upturned the lives of ordinary people like myself by hoarding 40,000 pieces of undelivered mail. The city was crawling with thieves and malcontents.

— Olivia Sudjic

Email is the scourge of our age,' said Silvia. 'Email and cancer.

— Olivia Sudjic

For a while this seemed to do the trick, and I felt that whatever contamination I had helped to spread, the boundaries I had helped to break, sprinkling flakes of myself all over the surface of New York like so much fish food, had been forgiven.

— Olivia Sudjic

From watching Silvia, I'd learned that one of the worst things about being ill is that most people find your suffering opaque. With this sadness it was different. I felt that I needed to nurture and protect it from people's understanding. I wanted Busy's sympathy because I wanted comfort and to feel less alone, and yet I also didn't want it—I didn't want my personal grief to be part of something universal right then.

— Olivia Sudjic

Have you ever tried to organize a threesome in real life?' I shook my head. I'd only encountered them in porn, but it seemed to happen without much admin, the same way all porn skipped out the granular details of sex, like condoms and kissing, that were supposed to happen in real life.

— Olivia Sudjic

Have you ever truly, keenly felt like you don't know who you are? Do you ever do something and think, Who is at the controls? Like some mad pilot has locked you out of the cockpit? I definitely do. I feel a kind of vertigo that makes me shake afterward. Furthermore, I guess we all feel it when making a difficult-seeming choice, and sometimes you seriously don't know what you want because you don't know who you're supposed to be, or who you want to be. Physics, my first and second families, my philosophy degree, had all failed to help me answer that question. The former has led me to wonder whether I am one of an infinite number of Alice's in multiple universes. A quantum fuck-up, which is someone who fucks up in every one of those universes but in different ways.

— Olivia Sudjic

I became convinced that I was being watched. Because self was still leaking everywhere, a part of me began to think it was Mizuki rather than a stranger. I hoped that there might still be a reunion. I hoped it in the shy, sly way hope comes out of the jar, the mistranslated box, last—after everything and everyone else has escaped.

— Olivia Sudjic

I began to cry but maintained my shouting through it, like a wind through sheets of rain.

— Olivia Sudjic

I couldn't decide what kind of person she was, whether she was one of those insects that look exactly like wasps but aren't. . . I just wanted to know if she would sting.

— Olivia Sudjic