For whatever it is that is less than mercy; for what we don’t even have a word for. Those were the worst days, I believed at the time, and yet the moment she died I’d have given anything to have them back. One small, horrible, glorious day after the other.
Kennedy Meadows.
But the thing was, I didn’t want it. Maybe I never really had. I’d finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in. I was there now. Or close.
One of my dearest friends took the photograph of me she kept in a frame, ripped it in half, and mailed it to me.
I saw no one, but, strange as it was, I missed no one. I.
La paura genera paura. La forza genera forza.
Where was my mother? I wondered. I’d carried her so long, staggering beneath her weight. On the other side of the river, I let myself think. And something inside of me released.
Do you like to read?” Christine asked. “That’s what we do when we come up here. That’s our idea of relaxation.
That mystery is not the curse of our existence; it’s the wonder. It’s what people are talking about when they talk about the circle of life that we’re all part of whether we sign up to be or not – the living, the dead, those being born right this moment, and the others who are fading out.
I never believed the boys were angry. I believed they were hurt and anger was the safest manifestation of their sorrow. It was the channel down which their impotent male rivers could rage.
I always ask my students to answer two questions about the work they and their peers have written: What happened in this story? and What is this story about?
It’s a useful way to see what’s there. A lot of times, it isn’t much.
You loathe yourself, and yet you’re consumed by the grandiose ideas you have about your own importance. You’re up too high and down too low. Neither is the place where we get any work done.
Or rather, it’s a bunch of what happened that ends up being about nothing at all.
In this sense, Tiny Beautiful Things can be read as a kind of ad hoc memoir. But it’s a memoir with an agenda. With great patience, and eloquence, she assures her readers that within the chaos of our shame and disappointment and rage there is meaning, and within that meaning is the possibility of rescue.
Nobody’s going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you’re rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you.
What this requires of us is that we don’t get tangled up in the living, even when we in fact feel woefully tangled up. It demands that we focus not only on what’s happening in our stories, but also what our stories are about.
At foot speed, the Sierra Nevada seemed just barely surmountable. I could always take another step. It was only when I rounded a bend and glimpsed the white peaks ahead that I doubted my abilities, only when I thought how far I had yet to go that I lost faith that I would get there.
Each day I felt as if I were looking up from the bottom of a deep well.
The sky didn’t wonder where it was.