And before you barrel through some idiotic Cosmo girl list of how-well-do-you-know-your-man questions, let me say that I don’t know squat about him except that he kisses like a god and screws like a devil.
What good did it do to light the world on fire if she had to watch the glow alone?
Before this trip and all that she’d learned about the three of them, she would have gotten angry or changed the subject. Anything to obscure the pain she felt. Now she knew better. You carried your pain with you in life. There was no outrunning it.
That was the one thing she knew now. Some chances came and went, and if you missed them, you could spend the rest of your life standing alone, waiting for an opportunity that had already passed you by.
She waited for you in a thousand different ways.
The at-home mother’s life: it was a race with no finish line.
Real friends. The kind that don’t purposely hurt your feelings or stop liking you for no reason.
Nina knew the power of black and white images. Sometimes a thing was its truest self when the colors were stripped away.
Alice started to cry. It came with no sound, no shuddering, no childlike hysterics, just a soul-deep release that turned into moisture and dripped down her puffy pink cheeks. She touched her tears, frowning. Then she looked up at Julia and whimpered two words before she fell asleep. ‘Real hurts.’
It was the Magic Hour, the moment in time when every leaf and blade of grass seemed to separate, when sunlight, burnished by the rain and softened by the coming night, gave the world an impossibly beautiful glow.
Liam learned that it was possible to appear to move forward when you were really standing still.
Men tell stories. Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over.
But love has to be stronger than hate, or there is no future for us.
Wounds heal. Love lasts. We remain.
Love. It was the beginning and end of everything, the foundation and the ceiling and the air in between.
Perhaps that’s why I find myself looking backward. The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present.
I know that grief, like regret, settles into our DNA and remains forever a part of us.
Today’s young people want to know everything about everyone. They think talking about a problem will solve it. I come from a quieter generation. We understand the value of forgetting, the lure of reinvention.
I am a mother and mothers don’t have the luxury of falling apart in front of their children, even when they are afraid, even when their children are adults.
It is easy to disappear when no one is looking at you.