Paulina Flores

Children don’t lie, but adults are the ones you believe.

When a person lives through intense experiences, he has the illusion of understanding many things.

The thing she was most anxious for when she was little was to stop being little.

Sometimes I wonder why I forgot it. It’s not because of my age—I remember things from when I was even smaller. That’s why I think maybe it’s something more, that maybe somehow I forgot it in order to get rid of a part of myself.

“This has been my life, and I understand that not everyone can be grateful.”

It was seductive to think of myself as a different person, and I was curious about all those things I was unfamiliar with.

She tended to feel unsatisfied with her life and she thought that if things had been different, “better,” she wouldn’t have to carry around all those insecurities that made her so unhappy. I told her that she was a twenty-five-year-old woman and she couldn’t go around holding her parents responsible for her life; she had to learn to accept things, that everybody makes do with what they have.

All I can do is to try to fit—or force—each piece into place, so everything achieves its meaning. Maybe I’m just an overly concrete person, one who can’t manage in the world without possessing a few key certainties.

“You remember the end of Melancholia? When they already know that the world is going to end and Kirsten Dunst tells Charlotte Gainsbourg that Earth is evil and that’s why they shouldn’t regret its disappearance, and that no one will miss it, because there is only life on Earth and we’re alone . . . That’s how I feel right now.”

It wasn’t that she felt like she would go crazy, at least not before midnight, but she had to admit that the current state of her life did not strike her as good.