I thought how lucky you might be to find not one but two extraordinary men to love – and what a fluke it was if they happened to love you back.
The worst thing about working as a caregiver is not what you might think. IT’s not the lifting and cleaning, the medicines and wipes, and the distant but somehow always perceptible smell of disinfectant. IT’s not even the fact that most people assume you’re only doing it because you really aren’t smart enough to do anything else. It’s the fact that when you spend all day in proximity to someone, there is no escape from their moods. Or your own.
To have someone out there who understands you, who desires you, who sees you as a better version of yourself, is the most astonishing gift.
Time flew. And each ended the night full and happy with the rare glow that comes from knowing your very being has been understood by somebody else. And that there might just be someone out there, who will only ever see the best in you.
Convinced that if she wished hard enough, good things would finally happen.
Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you still had your mother or father at your back, you’d be okay. Some deep-rooted part of you would know you were loved. That you deserved to be loved.
No journey out of grief was straightforward. There would be good days and bad days. Today was just a bad day, a kink in the road, to be traversed and survived.
I remembered Agnes’s words: that we who traveled far from home would always have our hearts in two places. I placed my hand on the candlewick bedspread. And, finally, I wept.
You’ve scored on my heart...
Will and I had been to each other, the way I felt that no person in the world had ever understood me like he did or ever would again.
I needed to tell him, silently, that things might change, grow, or fail, but that life did go on. That we were all part of some great cycle, some pattern that it was only God’s purpose to understand.
Their eyes met, and in those few silent moments, he told her everything. He told her that she was the most astonishing thing he had ever encountered. He told her that she haunted his waking hours, and that every feeling, every experience he had in his life up to that point was flat and unimportant to the enormity of this. He told her he loved her.
You had to seize the day. You had to embrace opportunities as they came. You had to be the kind of person who said yes.
Jess’s grandmother had often said that the key to a happy life was a short memory.
We all make mistakes. Go and take your punishment, then come back and start again. Do even better next time. I know you can.
You shut down a library Louisa, you don’t just shut down a building, you shut down hope.
So this is it. You are scored on my heart, Clark.
I know this – nobody gets everything. And we immigrants know this more than anyone. You always have one foot in two places. You can never be truly happy because, from the moment you leave, you are two selves, and wherever you are one half of you is always calling to the other. This is our price, Louisa. This is the cost of who we are.
Do you know how stifling it is to be told you are never going to be able to change? For the rest of your life? Because nobody else wants you to? Do you know how awful it is to feel stuck?
I ask you not to judge me for my weakness. The only way I can endure is to be in a place where I will never see you, never be haunted by the possibility of seeing you with him. I need to be somewhere where sheer necessity forces you from my thoughts minute by minute, hour by hour, I cannot do that here.