He had abandoned her after all; it filled her with the kind of bone-deep disappointment she knew so well.
She knew that she was making a decision she might regret, but it felt inevitable. “Nothing matters except us.
Someone said to me once that Alaska didn’t create character; it revealed it.
In the past days, she’d come to understand the importance of upheaval. The tallest mountains were created by violence and chaos; like them, a woman’s independence was born of fire.
With the wisdom of time and the passing of years, she knew that. She knew, too, that love didn’t evaporate. It faded, perhaps, lost its weight like bones left out in the sun, but it didn’t go away.
I love you, Papa,” she said quietly, realizing how true it was, how true it had always been. Love had turned into loss and she’d pushed it away, but somehow, impossibly, a bit of that love had remained. A girl’s love for her father. Immutable. Unbearable but unbreakable.
Should that be enough for her? Was she wrong to want passion? To dream of something – someone – more? She’d always imagined love to be turbulent and volatile, an emotion that would sweep her up and break her to pieces and reshape her into someone she couldn’t otherwise have become.
Don’t take peace for granted, he’d said to her often. It can shatter like glass.
You shine a light on hard times. This is what your pictures do. You do not let people look away from that which hurts.
I close my eyes and in the darkness that smells of mildew and bygone lives, my mind casts back, a line thrown across years and continents.
They couldn’t touch my heart. They couldn’t change who I was inside. My body... they broke that in the first days, but not my heart, V. Whatever he did, it was to your body, and your body will heal.
It was the very bleakness of winter that made spring possible.
The truth of my circumstance climbs into the bed with me and takes up too much room.
Home was a state of mind, the peace that came from being who you were and living an honest life.
As I write, I am reminded of that passage from the Bible – the one that is read at every wedding: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child.” Now, I understand as an adult. Maybe for the first time in my life. This article would break my mother’s heart, and perhaps even worse, her spirit. That didn’t matter to me a week ago; in fact, I wanted to hurt her then. My only excuse: then I was a child.
The love of books, of reading. There is nothing a librarian likes better than sharing her love of words with a child.
I know a thing or two about jealousy, how it can cut you to the bone and bring out the worst in you.
Nina had spent a lot of time with injured or dying people, standing witness, revealing universal pain through individual suffering.
I’ve been wanting to start over, dreaming of it. And now, finally, I know where I want to be when I begin this new part of my life.
I’m starting over now; this is my new beginning.