I’m sorry. For all of us. Sorry for all the little ways the people who were supposed to love us most could hurt us so deeply, despite their shared heritage and blood, as thought their knowledge of our pasts gave them unlimited access to all the most tender places, the old wounds that could be so easily reopened with no more than a glance, a comment, a passing reminder of all the ways in which we failed to live up to their expectations.
It takes a strong woman to lose everything, then stand naked in front of the mirror and face herself again. You need time, honey. And I don’t mean time for it to go away. I mean time to learn how to live with it. This is a pain you’ll always carry.
What they hadn’t talked about was betrayal. How something you’d known and loved forever could turn on you, could break your heart even as it left you alive.
Sometimes the right hug from the right person at the exact right time makes all the wrong in the world disappear...
They key to a great party is the music,” Sam says, scrolling through his iPod as we tramp through the sand. Eddie – the guy having the party – put Sam in charge of the playlist. “If it’s too intense, no one will be able to hang out and talk. But if it’s too mellow, it will turn into a snoozefest. You also have to consider timing. There’s a particular kind of music appropriate for each stage of the party – intro, warm-up, full swing, wind-down, and outro.
All the people who’d brought me here, past and present, ancient and young, legend and life and lore, I channeled. I welcomed them into my infinite heart, alongside the ghosts, the shadows, the ache I’d always carry. I made their strength mine, a part of me. My inspiration. My voice.
Through pictures, we cut reality in pieces. We selected only the choicest moments, discarding the rest as if they’d never happened.
There’s peace in acceptance. Death in it, always. Inevitable. With the acceptance of one thing comes the dying of another: a new belief, a relationship. An ideal, a plan, a what-if. Assumptions. A path. A song.
Beneath the vast diamond sky, I felt both all important and utterly significant, the goddess and the damned in equal measure.
Sometimes life’s most important moments are quiet, a decision made quick and calm.
Family tragedies had a way of smashing everything apart and then gluing it all back together. The problem was no one ever knew how long the glue would hold.
The hardest thing is that I’ll never know exactly what I lost, how much it should hurt, how long I should keep thinking about him. He took that mystery with him when he died, and a hundred thousand one-sided letters in my journal wouldn’t have brought me any closer to the truth than I was at the night I pressed my fingers to the sea glass he wore around his neck and kissed him back.
Not so long ago I’d been convinced that losing my voice was the worst thing that could ever happen to me, the worst tragedy. But since then I’d been losing my whole self, everything I stood for, believed in, felt. Everything I ever wanted to be. Everything I ever was.
Ink and paper were the only place where my voice didn’t falter, didn’t betray the real me.
Every day you wake up and think, we’ll fix things tomorrow.
When you don’t feel like talking, no one can force you, no matter how many stories and secrets might be locked inside.
There were tears in his eyes. The ocean rose inside him, and I looked away, before it got me, too.
No matter how long you waited, no matter how hard you wished, no matter how much you missed the past, time marched forward.
Frankie Perino and I were lucky that day. Lucky to be alive-that’s what everyone said.
It seemed everything that had ever lived and died in this world had passed through here, had left its indelible imprint.