There was only the stillness and silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing began.
You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding.
What if I forgave myself even though I’d done something I shouldn’t have?
It was only after her death that I realized who she was: the apparently magical force at the center of our family who’d kept us all invisibly spinning in the powerful orbit around her.
You go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage.
But now that she was dying, I knew everything. My mother was in me already. Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me too.
I never had a mind for math. I simply couldn’t hold the formulas and numbers in my head. It was logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn’t a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.
And so I walked on.
We’re all going to die, Johnny. Hit the iron bell like it’s dinnertime.
We aren’t poor,” my mother said, again and again. “Because we’re rich in love.
She understands that attention is the first and final act of love, and that the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn’t cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.
It’s wrong that this is required of you. It’s wrong that your son died. It will always be wrong.
You’ve made it so long without your sweet boy and now you can’t take it anymore. But you can. You must.
There are stories you’ll learn if you’re strong enough to travel there. One of them might cure you.
When you say you experience my writing as sacred, what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I built in my obliterated place.
Perhaps by now I’d come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.
I’ve given you everything,” she insisted again and again in her last days. “Yes,” I agreed. She had, it was true. She did. She did. She’d come at us with maximum maternal velocity. She hadn’t held back a thing, not a single lick of her love.
I would suffer. I would suffer. I would want things to be different than they were. The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.
Maybe it was ridiculous to go on a date with someone I’d barely spoken to and whose main appeal was that he was good-looking and he liked Wilco. I’d certainly done such things with men based on far less.
I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too.