Bucket lists aren’t important. Benchmarks aren’t important. Neither are goals. You take the wins in small ways: Did I wake up this morning? Do I have a roof over my head? Are the people I care about doing okay? You don’t need the things you don’t have. You only need what you’ve got, and the rest? It’s just gravy. It’s been three years since I recovered from Covid; two years since I was vaccinated; one year since I finished my degree in art therapy and started my own practice.
It’s because you don’t just tell stories,” Darija explained. “You paint with words.
She watched Peter’s face transform as she spoke, like the change of a season. Why hadn’t she taken the time before, when she had it, to tell Peter that she understood?
Why?” I asked. “What did you ever do to them?” Josek looked down at me. “I exist,” he said softly.
By late March 1942, everyone knew someone who had been deported... It was the season of Passover, and this was our plague, but no amount of lambs’ blood would save a household from tragedy. It seemed the only blood that satisfied was that of the families inside.
Did you ever wonder who you would have been, if you hadn’t become who you are?
The first time you make a decision like that, a decision which rubs against all your morals, is the hardest. The second time, though, is not so hard. And that makes you feel a fraction better about the first time. And so on. But you can keep dividing and dividing and you’ll never entirely get rid of the sourness in your stomach that you taste when you think back to the moment you could have said no.
In November, there were changes. My father came home one day with yellow stars, which we were to wear on our clothing at all times.
Just because I get close to something that makes a lot of people uncomfortable doesn’t mean I’m special. It just means I am willing to get close to the things that make people uncomfortable.
Mayflies have the shortest life span on earth. Like, twenty-four hours. Wouldn’t you feel terrible if you caused an even more untimely death?
I keep trying to be an atheist, but it just won’t take. In spite of how much garbage there is in the Bible – like all the instructions on how to treat your slaves, and how women should pretty much accept that we’re destined to be the property of men – there is still something about faith that I cannot let go of. I do not know what this world is, but I know that it contains miracles that I cannot explain, and the love that people have for each other is the biggest mystery of all.
It is pitch dark and raining when I leave Josef’s house, shaking beneath the responsibility of his confessions. What I want.
You get so used to the world being a certain way, there seems to be no escape from it.
Do you think I wanted this? Do you think anyone wakes up and says, I think I’ll go get an abortion this morning? This is the last stop. This is the place you go when you run through all the scenarios and you realize that the only people who say there’s another way are the ones who aren’t standing there with a positive pregnancy test in their hand.
Everyone talks like it’s all right to be different, but America’s supposed to be this melting pot, and what the hell does that mean? If it’s a melting pot, then you’re really just trying to make everyone the same, aren’t you?
Is this coldhearted man the one who will lead us through this war, our general, our white knight? Before we can even backpedal with explanations, Dr. Chance takes a Sharpie marker and draws a face on the latex, complete with a set of wire-rimmed glasses to match his own. “There,” he says, and with a smile that changes him, hands it back to Kate.
I tell her, because I don’t know how to say what I really want to: that the people you love can surprise you everyday. That maybe who we are isn’t so much about what we do, but rather what we’re capable of when we least expect it.
We are a study of contrasts – hard to soft, fair to dark, frantic to smooth – and yet there is something about the fit of us that makes me realize neither of us would be quite right without the other.
In our living room we have a whole shelf devoted to the visual history of our family. Everyone’s baby pictures are there, and some school head shots, and then various photos from vacations and birthdays and holidays. They make me think of notches on a belt or scratches on a prison wall – proof that time’s passed, that we haven’t all just been swimming in limbo.
Forgiveness is spiritual. Punishment is legal,” Leo says.