And it took me by surprise how much I wanted to be kissed by him, to realize that I’d thought about it so often that I’d memorized the exact shape of his lips, that I’d imagined running my finger down the cleft of his chin.
I think we were both aware that we were falling in love. I thought that getting to this part was the challenge. In books and movies, the stories always end when the two people finally have their romantic kiss. The happily-ever-after part is just assumed.
Pieces of my father’s brain are on the asphalt.
Mom and I made three pies with wild blackberries that Teddy and I had picked.
Her voice jolts me back to reality. Back to the reality of the past three years. There are so many things that demand to be said. Where did you go? Do you ever think about me? You’ve ruined me. Are you okay? But of course, I can’t say any of that.
You know that saying about a frog in a pot? How you can put a frog in boiling water and it’ll jump straight out, but if you put a frog in tepid water and slowly increase the heat, it’ll adjust and adjust until it dies?
So dark you almost miss it.
And the memories of my life as it was, and the flashes of it as it might be, are coming so fast and furious. I feel like I can no longer keep up with them but they keep coming and everything is colliding, until I cannot take it anymore. Until I cannot be like this one second longer. There is a blinding flash, a pain that rips through me for one searing instant, a silent scream from my broken body. For the first time, I can sense how fully agonizing staying will be.
I never really bought in Kim’s notion that they were somehow bound together through me- until just now when I saw her half carrying him down the hospital corridor.
I needed to be somewhere where people wouldn’t be sad, where the thoughts concerned life, not death.
The talks were like blood transfusions, moments of realness and hope that were pinpricks of light in the dark fabric of small-town life.
And I realize that before there’s a next, there’s a now that needs attending to.
Maybe if I’d had some practice, maybe if I’d had more devastation in my life, I would be more prepared to go on.
Close your eyes, think of the year ahead. This is your chance. This can be the day it all changes.
Every fiction has its base in fact,” he tells her.
When you’re on the road, there is awlays the promise of the next stop being better than the last.
I learned that childhood rhyme or the dictum that demanded you scratch your head every time you heard a siren, lest the next siren be for you. But I do know when I started doing it, and now it’s become second nature. Still, in a place like Manhattan, where the sirens are always blaring, it can become exhausting to keep up.
I wake up this morning to a thin blanket of white covering our front lawn. It isn’t even an inch, but in this part of Oregon a slight dusting brings everything to a standstill as the one snowplow in the county.
I was tired of being in the charge of cruel and clueless adults. The world was upside down. The adults had abandoned their roles. They’d surrounded themselves in a cocoon of ignorance – and then told us we were screwed up. We couldn’t trust them anymore. There was nobody out there watching out for us, taking care of us. We had to look out for ourselves.
Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.” You have taken your first step, not toward death but toward a different way of living your life. That itself is the definition of fearless.