I’d never met... anyone who was worth giving up the more I wanted down the line.
Big mistake: that generation is compulsively competitive about generosity, and the biscuits meant she had to get a bag of scones out of the freezer and defrost them in the microwave and butter them and decant jam into a battered little dish, while I sat on the edge of her slippery sofa manically jiggling one knee until Cassie gave me a hairy look and I forced myself to stop. I knew I had to eat the damn things, too, or the “Ah, go on” phase could last for hours.
I don’t think there are any rules for how you’re supposed to act when someone you care about dies, sweetheart. I think you just have to figure it out as you go along. Sometimes you’ll feel like crying, sometimes you won’t, sometimes you’ll be raging at him for dying on you. You just have to remember that all of those are OK. So is whatever else your head comes up with.” “On.
I pictured every inch of what she would look like now: the crow’s-feet from smiles I hadn’t seen, the softness of her belly from kids who weren’t mine, all her life that I had missed written on her body in Braille for my hands to read.
For months she had slowly been turning into my own secret magnetic north.
The moonlight whitened the lawn into a wide fitful sea, with the house tall and still in the middle, exposed on every side; besieged.
My ribs opened up like windows, I’d forgotten you could breathe that deeply.
I put my time and energy into bringing answers, not hugs and hot chocolate.
His accent needs subtitles.
If you’re perfectly happy with what you’ve got–specially if what you’ve got isn’t even all that spectacular–then you’re dangerous. You’re breaking all the rules, you’re undermining the sacred economy, you’re challenging every assumption that society’s built on.
This guy couldn’t order a sandwich without tying himself in knots about the possible consequences of mayonnaise.
You know what it was like? It was like being in a blizzard. You can’t see what’s right in front of your face, you can’t hear anything except this white-noise roar that never lets up, you don’t have a clue where you are or where you’re heading, and it keeps just coming at you from every direction, just coming and coming and coming. All you can do is keep on taking the next step – not because it’ll actually get you anywhere, just so that you don’t lie down and die. That was what it was like.
I had forgotten that God, or the world, or whatever carves the rules in stone, doesn’t give you time off for good behavior.
But we’re so desperate, aren’t we, to believe that bad luck only happens to people who deserve it.
The pictures are good, Toby. They’re good. But this is the only way, no one’ll ever look twice if they come from me, I went to art school –.
All those years of endless excruciating therapy sessions, of staying vigilant over every move and word and thought; I had been sure I was mended, all the breaks healed, all the blood washed away. I knew I had earned my way to safety. I had believed, beyond any doubt, that that meant I was safe.
Above the front door the fanlight glowed blue, delicate as wing-bones.
The button developed a life of its own, swollen with symbolism, a single chance at salvation pulsing redly in the corner and if I blew it too soon or left it too late then I was lost.
I’d been expecting someone so nondescript he was practically invisible, maybe the Cancer Man from The X Files, but this guy had rough, blunt features and wide blue eyes, and the kind of presence that leaves heat streaks on the air where he’s been.
If you let other people decide what you think about something like that, if you just follow along because it’s trendy, then who are you? When the flock changes direction tomorrow, what, you just throw away everything you think and start over, because other people said so? Then what are you, underneath? You’re nothing. You’re no one.