That was the blessing of certain childhoods. The illusion of your invincibility

Nederlands Dans Theater 01, 2009 © Erwin Olaf

It was not an original story. Every ballet parent was a monster of ambition. Every ballet parent knew the terrible math. Only a few people got to be elite dancers. Everything else was just preparation for a time when dance would be something they used to do, a person they used to be. Starting ballet was like entering a second, more intense gravitational field. At any moment, an injury could end it all. Or the mind could snap and there you went, done, burned out, exhausted.
(p. 109*)

Good would never have been enough for his father. If you tried your best and all you were was good, then it was time to try something else. His father believed in the optimal, and if you weren’t able to get to the highest level, then you were doing something for which you were not optimally suited. Good was an insult. Good was mediocre.
(p. 108*)

He had the kind of body you could only get at great personal risk. He was good-looking, in a way that seemed incongruous with ordinary life. Like the kind of attractiveness only people on TV or with large social media followings could have. But he looked pained, too. All that body had cost him something.
Lionel could understand that. The cost of the life you wanted. The way it could bound back on you. Extract its due.
(pp. 21-22*)

Sincerity was a condescending emotion. People went around calling you brave when you tried to kill yourself and failed. They called you brave when you went limping through your life, as if the very difficulty of it were a sign of moral courage or valor. But there was nothing noble in suffering. There was nothing brilliant or good about the failed endeavor to exit one’s life. There was nothing courageous about the persistence of life, the prolonged project of living. People called you brave for going on because it affirmed their own value system. They considered their own life worth living, and so they considered every life worthy.
But it had to be true that life could be discarded when it was no longer of use. It had to be true that a person could ball their life up and throw it out with the trash if they found they had no desire to go on. Some lives, Lionel thought, had to be ordinary or ugly or painful. Ending your life had to be on the table. If you were the one really in control, and you were in it for yourself, then ending your life certainly had to be an option if you wanted it to be. But people called you brave for going on. They called you brave even if you only lingered in the world because you’d lost your real courage at the moment it mattered most.
(p. 168*)

The man next to him kept looking his way, and one or two times their eyes caught, and Lionel wondered at the feeling of recognition he experienced. The two of them were, by some strange bit of luck, on the outside of the conversation, though Lionel suspected that for the man this was intentional. He envied that. The way some people could choose to be in a moment with others or not. It was a choice he didn’t have access to, personally. He always felt that he was arriving at the moment just as it was ending and everyone was moving on. He had no sense of timing. But the man’s eyes kept catching him, and Lionel started to feel that the two of them, on the outside, had come to rest in their own moment. Their own tempo.
(p. 10*)

There was a hard knock on the door.
“Two minutes,” Lionel said. He ran the faucet again to give the person on the other side the idea that he was washing his hands. His mother would have told him to comb his hair and said that he had the bad habit of letting white people see him nappy and disheveled. He always wanted to tell her when she got on him about it that white people were just people, but he knew that it was a naive and stupid thing to say, because white people were white people.
(p. 16*)

That was the blessing of certain childhoods. The illusion of your invincibility. Your safety. Some people didn’t know the danger they were in until years later, looking back. That was a kind of blessing, too, in a way. The ignorance of your own peril.
(p. 46*)

But on the way, she started again:
“I saw the way you looked at him.”
“I didn’t look at him in any way.”
“I saw it,” she said. “I saw it and I knew.”
“What does it matter?”
“It doesn’t. I don’t care what you do. But don’t lie to me about it.”
They’d gone back and forth like that all the way to Sophie’s apartment building, and when she asked if he wanted to come up, he said he’d go home and sleep, that he was feeling tired and a little drunk, and she said he shouldn’t drive in the snow that way, and he’d just sat there behind the wheel, the car idling, issuing exhaust into the night, until she got out and shut the door not hard, but firm, which to him had seemed sadder than anything else in the whole world, that she wasn’t even mad, that she was just concerned for him, and he was about to go do something shitty. But then she was gone, and he was in the car, and he texted Lionel at the number he’d watched him type into Sophie’s phone and had committed to memory, as if he knew even then what he was going to do.
(p. 53*)

This morning, when Charles left, he had kissed Lionel and said he would be back, which at the time seemed like something to say. It was what you said after you slept with someone: See you around, see you next time, I’ll be back. It didn’t mean anything. But now, with the question put to him this way, he felt unsure what he’d meant by that—I’ll be back.
(p. 54*)

Hartjes wanted to want him, the same way he wanted to see the rise and swell of Simon’s chest, the firm clench of his stomach, and to feel hot all over with need and the slick, gathering wet that sluiced the glide into desire. He wanted it all, yet what he felt, what he really felt in the seat of his body, where his soul nestled and hummed, was the companionable happiness that came with friendship. But he could see hunger in Simon’s eyes, hunger and other things, other shapes of feelings that he wanted to ask Simon about but couldn’t bring himself to.
(p. 59*)

Hartjes had wanted to say that if it was easy to get over your mother discarding you, then the whole world would be a different and stranger place. That hurt had a weight to it, a gravity as essential as the Earth’s, and it was a kind of natural law that kept them all doing as they should.
(p. 66*)

She could have told Marta anything at all, and Marta would have believed her. But maybe that’s what love was, she thought to herself as she fell asleep. Maybe love was that you didn’t try too hard to tell the difference. Maybe love was just believing something to be true because you’d been told.
(p. 133*)

There were a million tiny ways to make someone feel bad about something that didn’t involve saying anything directly.
(p. 135*)

All that long summer, she carried the kitten around with her, stroking it and petting it and saying that she loved it. Giving the kitten everything she didn’t have. Until her grandmother got sick of seeing her loving up on the kitten and pulled it from her hands and flung it out the back door. She said that girls had no business holding on to things with all them fleas. And cats would make a girl hot, and Grace was already fast enough. She never saw the kitten again.
(p. 160*)
*according to my reader

Brandon Taylor - Filthy Animals (Riverhead Books, 2021)