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.
This was just not fair. To get a taste of freedom, only to instantly be punished for it.
So many things we ask for, hope for, prayers put out into a world so wide: there was no way they could all be answered. But you had to keep asking. If you didn’t, nothing even had a chance of coming true.
There’s no shame in trying to make stuff work, is how I see it. It’s better than just accepting the broken.” I wanted to say he was lucky he even had a choice. That for most of us, once something was busted, it was game over. I would have loved to know how it felt, just once, to have something fall apart and see options instead of endings.
Don’t think or judge,′ I said. ‘Just listen.