In the two months I had also dated Justin Fellowes, this guy in my Spanish class, though after three weeks we decided we should “see other people,” which in my case was a joke, but it beat hearing him remark on everything I ate. ‘I don’t know why girls are always on a diet,’ he’d say when I ordered a Diet Coke, and ‘You should watch your starch intake’ when I had a muffin.
She survived something big, and when you survive something big, you are always, always aware that next time you might not.
Grief is everywhere. It’s its own being. It walks beside you silently, jumps out at you meanly, pokes you awake at night. It makes tears roll down your cheeks at a blue sky.
True love, the good, beautiful, one-and-only kind, the kind between loving friends and family and partners who are mostly just trying hard to do their best, it manages to overlook some pieces of its story. It overlooks what he can’t give you or how she failed you or what mistakes he made when he was struggling. It stays steady at its center. It evolves, through drought and storm. It grows. It survives.
The point is that you feel uncomfortable, and you’re trying to talk yourself out of it because you think you’re supposed to be nice.
You wouldn’t match Melanie and me up, and if we hadn’t gotten stuck together as lab partners in junior high science, I doubt if we’d have matched us up either. I’m not sure why we even stuck, except that we each probably find the other to be entertaining... Besides I feel like it was a personal mission of mine to broaden Melanie’s world, though I think she felt the same for me.
Your only job – and it’s a big one – is to try to speak and live your own honest truth. That truth might shift. You might need more time to even understand what that truth is. That’s it. That’s the job. Trying to manage or control everyone else? Not the job. Impossible, besides.
Usually, I set one foot in a library and I feel my own internal volume lower. A library is a physical equivalent of a sigh. It’s the silence, sure, but it’s also the certainty of all those books, the way they stand side by side with their still, calm conviction. It’s the reassurance of knowledge in the face of confusion.
She doesn’t bother to tell him that he should not be sorry, that he is not responsible for any of those things. She doesn’t bother because they are both chronic apologizers, and chronic apologizers know that sorry is also just sorrow for the general state of the world.
The problem is, she’s done things too often because she didn’t what to disappoint people.
When you are a human being, you must decide and decide again to go forward. You must, or you won’t move from the worst that life offers...
Love is corny, when you get right down to it. It has two left feet. It trips over itself, because it is so large that it’s awkward. It’s sort of silly, done right. After all, how do you convey something that huge?
This is the problem with danger, isn’t it? You can even be warned and ignore the warning. Danger can seem far away until the sky grows dark, and a bolt of fury heads straight toward you.
Grief is everywhere. It’s its own being. It walks beside you silently, jumps out at you meanly; pokes you awake at night.
When you go looking for rescue, you end up trapped in your own weakness.
Running away can also be running to.
He’s going for wisdom but the real wisdom is knowing there sometimes isn’t any.
She can’t truly outrun her future, but you can’t tell her body that.
Maybe she could quit her big job of being responsible for everyone else’s feelings... She imagines it – letting go. Handing the heavy stuff back to the people it belongs to.
It’s hard to be all that you can be on carrot sticks and criticism.