I was starting to see that the past might color the future, but it didn’t determine it. And if I could believe that, it was much easier to let go of what I’d done wrong.
But I do know that my own shittiest days were usually followed by better ones.
There are the ones who believe, and the ones who don’t, and caught in the space between them are guns.
She is not the child that mirrors me, and yet when you put us side by side, there are definite similarities. It’s not in the shape of the mouth but the set of it, the sheer determination that silvers our eyes.
A child who believed in fairy tales. Not the silly Disney ones your mother read to you, but the ones with blood and thorns, with girls who knew that love could kill you just as often as it could set you free.
I tell myself that I’ve invited him along to add to the thrill – one more person who knows only makes it more exciting. But it’s really because there are some nights when you just want to know there’s someone else besides you in this wide world.
He wandered off, leaving me to wonder why white people named girl babies things like Hope and Faith and Patience – names they could never live up to – and black mothers called their daughters Mercy, Deliverance, Salvation – crosses they’d always have to bear.
How could he convey to someone who’d never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its braid? How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turned the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been?
It seemed to Wren that having a mother had a lot less to do with a few sweaty hours of labor and delivery, and a lot more to do with whose face you always looked for in a crowd.
A trial, it often came down to who had the best story.
Can a person hold tightly to two thoughts that look, at first sight, as if they’d cancel each other out?
When you get down to it, though, explaining what you believe isn’t all that easy. If you say that you believe something to be true, you might mean one of two things – that you’re still weighing the alternatives, or that you accept it as a fact. I don’t logically see how one single word can have contradictory definitions, but emotionally, I completely understand. Because there are times I think what I am doing is right, and there are other times I second-guess myself every step of the way.
It felt like the stamp of a passport when you reached your own country, and realized that the only reason you’d traveled was to remember the feeling of home.
Boy, she told Louie, don’t you let nobody tell you who you can’t be.
I think it’s rude to stick a smile on your face and pretend you like talking to someone when in reality you’d rather be sticking bamboo slivers under your fingernails.
The reason you hold on to someone too tightly isn’t always to protect them – sometimes it’s to protect yourself.
I wonder how long it takes before the polish given by nature gets worn off by nurture.
There was blood, so much blood that it painted his face and stained his hair. There was blood, so much blood that several moments passed before I recognized my father.
What if, when I get home, Nicholas is standing on the porch with open arms, willing to pick up where we left off? Can I let myself make the same mistakes all over again?
Magick isn’t about getting rid of everything blocking your path.