Hannah Lillith Assadi

“I meditated on my childhood, vague and distant before high school, where Laura still flickered only on the edge of things.”

“Don't fall in love or let anyone's life become more important than your own.”

“Her father kneels and unclasps the urn. Above the waves she falls graceful as snow, my sister, my Sonora.”

“I knew beauty for me would only ever be derived from loss.”

“For those I come from, there is nothing more devouring than the feeling of want for home, the feeling of need for home. We are all waiting for a form of transport, a ship, a saucer to carry us out of the too-dark night.”

“With the years, we become even more ourselves and call this change.”

“I remember wanting to flee her, and being unable to flee her, so in need of her and half hating her for it, and I still am nauseous from it.”

“I first understood why Christians prayed for a savior in the form of a beautiful man. He had absolved me of the blue-streaked blond.”

“My loves have always been seared with this singing, this singing written by death, the way some lands have always been crippled by war.”

“When you are rich, your past disappears. You get everything you want when you want it . . . Everyone wants to know you. Everyone wants to be your friend.”

“New York was always so beautiful in the very crux of parting with it.”

“I wanted to walk faster, to run, far as possible from her, from my entire life, from the first day I ever saw her always just a few steps ahead.”

“When I returned to New York, it had already changed. I always wished things could just remain.”

“I look out at the reservation, still and glittering with casinos, and think of all the death dried up and buried in its dirt.”

“It was long past midnight. Laura's music played on. It was composed in the language of stars, tinkling in a crystal pool suspended from constellations. She used chimes now and then, the chimes that characterized every patio in Arizona, the piano, the trees combed by wind. A prelude to a storm. It was like discovering the secret room in a dream of your house that holds all the magic. It was music I wished I lived inside. Around us, cactus, hills filled with jumping cholla, the heat of August like another animal heaving over us.”

“Our past would dissolve. We would move on from each other and from the ghosts of our youth.”

“I lit a cigarette. 'Go ahead, take a smoke,' my father said. 'It won't kill you. Only sadness will.”

“I understood it in my bones. Longing made the music bigger.”

“My brain came alight with tenderness for her. I felt so sorry for everything. I yearned to embrace her, kiss her even, to stay with her, always her, my sister, my friend to the end. It was a story after all, even if a sick one. It was completely ours.”

“I slowly lost any dream for myself. No one warned me of this, that the stars in New York can infect the light inside, that they can trap you in their shadow. Dylan was of course a star. He had achieved the thing we all came to New York wanting.”