She’d wanted so much for me: the moon and more. But maybe, right now, the moon was enough.
Restoring order of my personal universe suddenly seemed imperative, as I refolded my T-shirts, stuffed the toes of my shoes with tissue paper, and arranged all the bills in my secret stash box facing the same way, instead of tossed in sloppy and wild, as if by my evil twin. All week, I kept making lists and crossing things off them, ending each day with a sense of great accomplishment eclipsed only by complete and total exhaustion.
What was it like to be so confident even in your failings that you weren’t the least bit bothered when other people pointed them out? I was almost envious.
Maybe it was a stupid exercise, and you couldn’t grow things in winter. But there was something I liked about he idea of those seeds, buried so deep, having at least a chance to emerge. Even if you couldn’t see it beneath the surface, molecules were bonding, energy pushing up slowly, as something worked so hard, all alone, to grow.
It felt so weird, to be on the other side, where you were the one expected to offer condolences, not receive them. I wanted my “sorry” to sound genuine, because it was. That was the hard thing about grief, and the grieving. They spoke another language, and the words we knew always fell short of what we wanted to say.
But you take what you get in this world. What else can you do?
The World,” she said, “is chock full of bitchy girls.
It didn’t matter that I’d done none of those things. With shame, like horseshoes, proximity counts.
But what really makes any story real is knowing someone will hear it and understand.
And all of it came down to one thing: love, or the lack of it. The chances we take, knowing no better, to fall or to stand back and hold ourselves in, protecting our hearts with the tightest of grips.
I’d made my choice, though, and I couldn’t take it back.
I was used to being invisible. People rarely saw me, and if they did, they never looked close.
But sometimes I longed for that sense of someone pulling me close, feeling another heartbeat against mine.
I hate not having what I want.
Life seemed so much more manageable when you could write it down neatly on paper.
How do you even begin to return to someone, much less convince them to do the same for you?
Of course he’d think I’d want to be apart of this: I was here, too. But all my life I’d felt more like an observer than an active participant. Beside the wheel, not behind. It was safer there, but could be lonely too, or so I was now realizing. Maybe there was a middle ground between living too hard and living at all. Maybe, here, I was finding it.
It was rare for things to be perfect and organized anyway, even with your best efforts. Embrace the messy and when things do come together just right, you’ll always be pleasantly surprised.
Nobody was all bad, I was learning. Even the worst person had someone who cared about them at some point” – Sydney Stanford.
Roo had seen something in it, and recognized a part of me that matched. How could someone know you better than yourself? Especially if they really didn’t know you, not at all.