“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 Mizuko 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
“Suddenly I had to laugh. It was like realising you definitely need to projectile vomit when you thought you had it under control in some imprisoning form of public space.”
— Olivia Sudjic
“We had, I felt, bared small pieces of our symmetrical souls to each other, fast, as if playing one of those breathless card games, and I had pretended to be as moved as I had been the first time I uncovered it all myself, back in East Hampton.”
— Olivia Sudjic
“Yeah!’ I said again, widening my eyes and nodding slowly but emphatically to show that she had seen into my own symmetrical soul.”
— Olivia Sudjic
“To me, it was clear proof of the existence of supersymmetry, the idea that every particle has a partner. She was mine.”
— Olivia Sudjic
“She was limp and pathetic and woozy and I loved her, I realised, even more because I knew how completely it was doomed.”
— Olivia Sudjic
“The glow of the steetlamps sat heavy and thick above me. As I walked aimlessly, in the direction of downtown, I returned to my theories. That Mizuko and I shared the pictorial equivalent of DNA. That a sympathetic magic existed between us, no matter how far apart we were pulled. That we defied physical laws of time and space, waves, gravity, the rules laid down by physicists which governed our physical universe (earthquakes, tsunamis) and physical bodies. And yet somehow our connection had led to the opposite of intimacy. My search had led to its opposite. I had never felt so isolated and disconnected, even from myself.”
— Olivia Sudjic
“Man with goatee. Man who looked like a Beatle. All the Beatles at once. Woman wearing newspaper hat. I’d grown used to how weird New Yorkers were, and I could fit them into types.”
— 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
“Was this what the city would look like when knowledge was no longer enough? When the desire to turn inward, surrendering entirely to one’s own private world of nonresistance, overwhelmed, like creeping ivy, our desire to know worlds beyond it?”
— 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
“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
“No order, no pattern, just chaos. Lots of little universes separated by invisible screens . . .”
— Olivia Sudjic
“I was on the sidewalk, buffering, wondering if it was okay to follow people in real life.”
— Olivia Sudjic
“She told me it was unlucky to share a reading with others, but the main point, the one I don’t mind mentioning because it seems relevant to the story, is that she said I had a kind of evil spirit following me. ‘Obviously,’ she added, ‘that sucks. But if we get you some amber—”
— 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 centimetre here and one centimetre there, moving at the speed fingernails grow, until finally everything just clicked into exactly the wrong place.”
— Olivia Sudjic
“Email is the scourge of our age,’ said Silvia. ‘Email and cancer.”
— Olivia Sudjic
“Maybe, as Mizuko said, we won’t even really die, just carry on in the feedback loop we are stuck in. Instead of connecting with new things, widening our worlds, algorithms have shrunk it to a narrow chamber with mirrored walls.”
— 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
“The messages must be stuck somewhere in the tube of light underneath the ocean that connects London and New York.”
— Olivia Sudjic
“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 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
“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 afterwards. 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 Alices 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
“My ability to make up lies on the spot chills me as much as it saves me.”
— Olivia Sudjic
“There was never one truth. Even the Higgs could still be used to prove opposing theories, its mass falling between them on a chart. Besides, I told myself, my breathing heavy, eyes widening until they bulged, I was post-truth.”
— Olivia Sudjic
“Well, then, what’s the plan now? You can’t stay here forever.’My plan was indeed to stay there forever.”
— 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
“Though I did not know her exact address, that she appeared to live almost within breathing distance of Robin, and that I lived with him, and that her pictures showed that she was now dating the mysterious Rupert Hunter, our despotic mothers, our absent fathers, the borders we had both crossed, all our many parallels and connections at every point, could not be chance. I saw it as evidence of the hidden connections between things, an all-powerful algorithm that sifted through chaos, singling out soulmates.”
— Olivia Sudjic