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21 " He turned the entire living room into an airport, complete with a four-foot-high LEGO traffic control tower and a fleet of paper planes, plastic army pilots taped safely into their cockpits. From deep beneath the couch, a large utility flashlight illuminates some sort of...landing strip? I crouch down for a better look.Oh. My. God.Stuck to the carpet in parallel, unbroken paths from one wall to the other are two lanes of brand-new maxi pads. Plastic dinosaurs stand guard at every fourth pad–triceratops and T rexes on one side, brontosauruses and pterodactyls on the other–protecting the airport from enemy aircraft and/or heavy flow. "
― Sarah Ockler , Bittersweet
22 " Emperor, right." she retacked the curtain " That's weird to say, after eighteen years of listening to celebrity gossip feeds go on and on about 'Earth's favorite prince'" . She claimed one of the lumpy sofa cushions, curling her legs beneath her. " I had a picture of him taped to my wall when I was fifteen. Grand-mere cut it off a cereal box." Wolf scowled." Of course, half the girls in the world probably have had that same picture from that same cereal box." Wolf scrunched his shoulders against his neck, and Scarlet grinned, teasing. " Oh, no. You're not going to have to fight him for pack dominance now are you? Come here." She beckoned him with a wave of her hand and he was at her side in half a second, the glower softening as he pulled her against his chest. "
23 " You know you're down and out when Okies laugh at you,' she said. With our garbage bag taped window, our tied down hood, and art supplies strapped to the roof, we'd out-Okied the Okies. "
― Jeannette Walls , The Glass Castle
24 " I glanced over, he was still looking at me. ''Uh... do you need something?''''No.''''Oh, okay.''''It's just...'' he leaned in, ''...you have an onion ring taped to your back.''''...Excuse me?''''There is a ring of onion applied to you back with an adhesive strip.''I searched his eyes, he seemed amused, but sincere.My hand flew to my back with a look of horror and there it was, with ketchup and everything. "
― Maddie Hample
25 " ... we decided to create a Nothing Place in the living room, it seemed necessary, because there are times when one needs to disappear while in the living room, and sometimes one simply wants to disappear, we made this zone slightly larger so that one of us could lie down in it, it was a rule that you never would look at that rectangle of space, it didn't exist, and when you were in it, neither did you, for a while that was enough, but only for a while, we required more rules, on our second anniversary we marked off the entire guest room as a Nothing Place, it seemed like a good idea at the time, sometimes a small patch at the foot of the bed or a rectangle in the living room isn't enough privacy, the side of the door that faced the guest room was Nothing, the side that faced the hallway was Something, the knob that connected them was neither Something nor Nothing. The walls of the hallway were Nothing, even pictures need to disappear, especially pictures, but the hallway itself was Something, the bathtub was Nothing, the bathwater was Something, the hair on our bodies was Nothing, of course, but once it collected around the drain it was Something, we were trying to make our lives easier, trying, with all of our rules, to make life effortless. But a friction began to arise between Nothing and Something, in the morning the Nothing vase cast a Something shadow, like the memory of someone you've lost, what can you say about that, at night the Nothing light from the guest room spilled under the Nothing door and stained the Something hallway, there's nothing to say. It became difficult to navigate from Something to Something without accidentally walking through Nothing, and when Something—a key, a pen, a pocketwatch—was accidentally left in a Nothing Place, it never could be retrieved, that was an unspoken rule, like nearly all of our rules have been. There came a point, a year or two ago, when our apartment was more Nothing than Something, that in itself didn't have to be a problem, it could have been a good thing, it could have saved us. We got worse. I was sitting on the sofa in the second bedroom one afternoon, thinking and thinking and thinking, when I realized I was on a Something island. " How did I get here," I wondered, surrounded by Nothing, " and how can I get back?" The longer your mother and I lived together, the more we took each other's assumptions for granted, the less was said, the more misunderstood, I'd often remember having designated a space as Nothing when she was sure we had agreed that it was Something, our unspoken agreements led to disagreements, to suffering, I started to undress right in front of her, this was just a few months ago, and she said, " Thomas! What are you doing!" and I gestured, " I thought this was Nothing," covering myself with one of my daybooks, and she said, " It's Something!" We took the blueprint of our apartment from the hallway closet and taped it to the inside of the front door, with an orange and a green marker we separated Something from Nothing. " This is Something," we decided. " This is Nothing." " Something." " Something." " Nothing." " Something." " Nothing." " Nothing." " Nothing." Everything was forever fixed, there would be only peace and happiness, it wasn't until last night, our last night together, that the inevitable question finally arose, I told her, " Something," by covering her face with my hands and then lifting them like a marriage veil. " We must be." But I knew, in the most protected part of my heart, the truth. "