I felt the nauseous shiver in my stomach—everything from rage to empathy to morning sickness—that I had grown used to and now thought of as being love.

— Olivia Sudjic

I found it hard to write the bits where the things that were at first surprising or even shocking became normal incrementally until I couldn't see that they were anything but normal, because everything else had shifted just one centimeter here and one centimeter there, moving at the speed fingernails grow, until finally everything just clicked into exactly the wrong place.

— Olivia Sudjic

I hope when this is done I'll be able to get back into my happy gardening vibe that was so healthy for me. I want to go back to my routine and my morning ritual with the compost, but it will probably be that my life will split in two. New Leaf Gardening in Wood Green will be happening in parallel to a fantasy that runs along the bottom of that screen like a ticker. Alice will be fine. Rabbit will stay up tonight, and every night. Resending and resending, reopening the page to see if she has responded, if anyone has. The spinning wheel will make my eyes hurt and everything else will go dark.

— Olivia Sudjic

In the last week I felt her withdrawing. What was once everywhere, an ocean I imagined myself to be drowning in, was now barely deep enough to bathe in. I saw her warmth draining away and I couldn't stop it.

— Olivia Sudjic

I saw a doctor. I went in case there were any remnants of the summer inside me—sticky, slender fish bones that needed to be scraped into the bin. He was dismissive of my concerns and said my body would have let me know by now. Did I have what was known as female intuition? I said I'd had my feminine intuition somewhat scrambled in the past.

— Olivia Sudjic

I saw her note the way I hovered over the various ethnicities on the form. First the 'white' box, then to the airspace over the 'black' box, a kind of momentary hesitation, a protest of stillness, a staring into the abyss of everything I did not know about myself. She, like me, was made of halves.

— Olivia Sudjic

It never ceased to amaze me how she just had the facts always, in her head. It occurred to me that if, or when, she died, a whole load of facts, a body of knowledge, might disappear without a trace.

— Olivia Sudjic

It's hard to explain how an infatuation actually starts. It's a state so all-encompassing that it's almost impossible to remember how it felt to live inside your own head before it began. Everything that precedes it becomes a pathway that was always leading there. Time before is valuable only as a resource with which to create a persona, to bind the object of the infatuation closer. I had given my (partially fabricated) past life to Mizuki to make a story that in the end never got told. Or not by her. It is also hard to explain the intensity of the infatuation itself. There is rarely an explanation that seems reasonable to anyone but you. Unless you're part of a cult or viral phenomenon, so that when you weep outside the object of your infatuation's hotel room, you do so in the company of millions.

— Olivia Sudjic

I was on the sidewalk, buffering, wondering if it was okay to follow people in real life.

— Olivia Sudjic

I went back to my room and spent all night contemplating whether it was possible in life not to be constantly let down. If it could ever be worth pinning your happiness to another person, when all other people ever seemed to do was disappear.

— Olivia Sudjic