21
" The Monster in Me I could do it. I could rip your life out like a fury, like a beast. I could stand over you with my red hands and lap the heart out of your hollow chest. I’m a wolf, I’m a woman, I’m a building hurricane. I’m whole-way sharp teeth, soul-sick wet claws. I say, “love me,” and you say, “you’re killing me.” I say, “I’d die for you,” and you say, “You’d kill for me— that’s not the same thing. "
― Elisabeth Hewer , Wishing for Birds
24
" Homesickness Standing under a million stars screaming up at them, PLEASE JUST TAKE ME HOME, with a voice rusty like the underside of boats, feeling it scratch at a throat like swallowed fish-bones. Making petitions to get the universe to care more, signing our names on any scrap of paper passed along like a single name could change the whole wide world. Could change galaxies. Tearing clothes, ripping skin, pleading, TAKE ME BACK, JUST TAKE ME BACK, I’m not willing to be a person any more. Science says I was part of a star once and I just— I want to be back there, always burning. These atoms could have been a lioness but here I am instead, these fragile limbs, and I never found out the returns policy. Take me back, take me back, I want to go home. Broken glass catching at my feet and the air too hot in my lungs. If I could have been anything why am I this? "
― Elisabeth Hewer , Wishing for Birds
38
" So people say, what is there to be positive about? What is there to hope for? And my answer is always the same—Voyager. The two spacecraft we threw out into space with the hope of a planet behind them. One of them carrying a letter that said, “We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours”. The most hopeful letter any human being ever wrote. Our thoughts, our languages, our music all travelling now through interstellar space. The odds of either Voyager being intercepted within our lifetimes are infinitesimal, but that’s not the point. The point is that one day, so many days into the future we can’t even comprehend the number, some bored lifeform might scoop up a dead, battered piece of junk and find a planet’s hope inside. And if, against all odds, they can understand it, they might just train their sights on our backwater of space and find the place we once occupied and think, Damn. We missed a trick there. So here we are, going about our lives, and all the while the Voyagers are out there, hurtling onward. Every day you wake up they’re just a little bit closer to something amazing. And that’s what makes me smile every time I think of it. Voyager, and the journey never-ending. "
― Elisabeth Hewer