Erica Lorraine Scheidt Quotes

I'm far from the world and I see it like a brightly lit ball in the distance. The sky behind it is mostly gray. It starts in silence, but I can see the people. Everyone is in a hurry. They're racing around the globe. They each hold a thread, like a bit of string, and it unravels, covering the planet. The buzzing starts. The buzzing gets faster and louder. They're all racing to one spot on the earth. I'm outside of it and I can see everything. I can see every person in the world racing to a single spot on the earth. The buzzing is all I can hear. It gets so I can't take it. Then I wake up.

In the happy times, in the tell-me-again times, when I'm seven and there are no stepbrothers and it's before the stepfathers, my mom lets me sleep in her bed.
Her bed is a raft on the ocean. It's a cloud, a forest, a spaceship, a cocoon we share. I stretch out big as I can, a five-pointed star, and she bundles me back up in her arms. When I wake I'm tangled in her hair.
"Tell me again," I say and she tells me again how she wanted me more than anything.
"More than anything in the world," she says, "I wanted a little girl.

You don't look like anyone special at all, I tell him. And I curse him. And I start a club to hate him. And I make a magic spell to get rid of him.

Alone is how our story starts. But then I came along and changed all that.

Angel asks me about Josh and I tell her that he likes it when I fall asleep with my head on his chest. I tell her how he keeps me wrapped up in his arms all night. How romantic it is, how he's loved me forever.
She knows how it is with boys. "It's always romantic in the beginning," she says.

I want to go back to the tell-me-again times when I slept in her bed and we were everything together. When I was everything to her. Everything she needed.

I belong here, I tell Toy. I'm hungry for every city block. Every brick building. Every crowded intersection. Electric. I feel brand new.

It's hard, omigod remember? Being a kid.

All of me, I think. I still have that.