He hadn’t woken a day since my death when the day wasn’t something to get through. But the truth was, the memorial service day was not the worst kind. At least it was honest. At least it was a day shaped around what they were so preoccupied by: my absence. Today he would not have to pretend he was getting back to normal – whatever normal was.
In violence, it is the getting away that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping only to land away from where you are.
Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish.
I was here for a moment, and then I was gone. I wish you all a long and happy life.
Something so divine that no one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child took with an adult.
I explained myself like this: I did not feel adamant about saying no, but I also didn’t feel adamant about saying yes, so until I felt strongly one way or another, I’d stick with no.
In moments like this she thought of all the little girls who grew into adulthood and old age as a sort of cipher alphabet for all those who didn’t. Their lives would somehow be inextricably attached to all the girls who had been killed.
Sometimes cats fall ten flights out of the windows of highrises and land on their feet. You only believe it because you’ve seen it in print.
These things, she felt, were not to be passed around like disingenuous party favors.
When the dead are done with the living,” Franny said to me, “the living can go on to other things.
People grow up by living. I want to live.
She held on to two sides of an hourglass and wondered how this could be possible. The time she’d had alone had been gravitationally circumscribed by when her attachments would pull her back. And they had pulled now – doublefisted.
I felt like observing my way out of there, but I didn’t.
I was raised by a solitary woman to be a solitary child, and that was, I now saw, what I had hopelessly become.
Ruth did not believe in makeup. She thought it demeaned women.
My mother’s desire to reach those waves, touch her feet to another ocean on the other side of the country, was all she was thinking of – the pure baptismal goal of it. Whoosh and you can start all over again. Or was life more like the horrible game in gym that has you running from one side of an enclosed space to another, picking up and setting down wooden blocks without end?
She had needed the time to know that this love would not destroy her, and I had, I now knew, given her that time, could give it, for it was what I had in great supply.
Buckley kept the shoe on his dresser, until one day it wasn’t there anymore and no amount of looking for it could turn it up.
I wish now that I had known this was weird.
It was in these moments, I knew, that my father loved my mother most. When my mother was broken and helpless, when her hard shell was stripped away and her spite and brittleness couldn’t serve her. It was a sad dance of two people who were starving to death in each other’s arms. Their marriage an X that forever joined murderer to victim.