Every morning I wake up and I tell myself this: It’s just one day, one twenty-four-hour period to get yourself through. I don’t know when exactly I started giving myself this daily pep talk – or why... But still, I find the need to remind myself of the temporariness of a day, to reassure myself that I got through yesterday, I’ll get through today.
But I’m also feeling all that I have in my life, which includes what I have lost, as well as the great unknown of what life might still bring me. And it’s all too much. The feelings pile up, threatening to crack my chest wide open.
You don’t ever find things when you’re looking for them. You find them when you’re not.
Karma’s not like a bank. Make a deposit, take a withdrawal. But more and more, I am starting to suspect that all this is payback for something – only not the good kind.
Of all the things and people she missed lately, it was odd to find herself at the top of the list.
Do you really think that if you don’t mention my family I’ll forget them?
You never knew, did you? Maybe not knowing didn’t have to be so terrifying. Maybe it could just be life. “When.
He sort of breathes music.
My husband used to say that scars were like tattoos but with better stories.” “I.
Some things are impossible to tear yourself away from.
I pull her to me. A thousand suns rise from my chest.
He looks at me and then, reverting to the voice he’d used with Kendra, says, ‘If homegirls wanna see me as ghetto trash’ – he stops and switches to his lispy, sassy voice – ‘or big-ass queer’ – now he switches to his deepest Shakespeare voice – ‘I shall not take it upon myself to disabuse them.
It had to do with the doubts. The same niggling doubts I always had about not belonging. I didn’t feel like I belonged with my family, and now I didn’t feel like I belonged with Adam, except unlike my family, who was stuck with me, Adam had chosen me, and this I didn’t understand. Why had he fallen for me? It didn’t make sense.
This isn’t about her. It was catalyzed by her, and she’s woven up in it, but this is ultimately about him and his life and what he needs to do to make himself whole. He’s stopped drifting, he’s stopped being tossed around by the wind.
In a funny way, Dad was always a bow-tie wearer, always a little more traditional than you might imagine. Because even though he had blue hair and tattoos and wore leather jackets and worked in a record store, he wanted to marry Mom back at a time when the rest of their friends were still having drunken one-night stands. “Girlfriend is such a stupid word,” he said. “I couldn’t stand calling her that. So, we had to get married, so I could call her “wife”’.
I know what I did to you was so wrong, but at the time it also felt so necessary to my survival.
I look at Ben now. And again I wonder how it is that we can feel so many of the same things and be so utterly different.
And her voice, it’s exactly the same. I don’t know why I’d expect it to be different except that everything’s different now.
We’ll just be the kinds of girls who have boyfriends in college.
Something tickles inside me, an echo from another time when it wasn’t all frozen in there.