I remembered Agnes’s words: that we who traveled far from home would always have our hearts in two places. I placed my hand on the candlewick bedspread. And, finally, I wept.
I ate new foods, walked strange streets, spoke to people in a language that wasn’t mine.
My thoughts were chasing each other in circles.
The sights and sounds of home.
I wondered how it would feel to be out there, on your own, in the middle of nowhere.
Thank you for their continuing faith and endless support.
Thank you. It was a bit of a surprise, but a very welcome one.
I took a deep breath, enjoying the unexpectedness of it all.
You have self-respect. You have friends. You have satisfaction every day, of a job well done. You have agency over your own life. These are not small things.
Trust that I am here. Trust me by my actions, my affections. Those are my currency.
Wisdom and knowledge shall be the stability of thy times.
I swore I wouldn’t contact you again. But six weeks on, and I feel no better. Being without you-thousands of miles from you-offer is no relief at all. The fact that I am no longer tormented by your presence, or presented with daily evidence of my inability to have the one thing I truly desire, has not healed me. It has made things worse. My future feels like a bleak, empty road.
But if you cannot change your situation, then you have no choice. You can only change how you think about it.
Si sente vivo e spregiudicato. Vuole vedere Nell ridere. Vuole andare in un club e ballare con lei fino alle ore piccole, con una mano sulla sua schiena sudata, tenendo gli occhi incatenati ai suoi. Vuole rimanere sveglio fino all’alba per un buon motivo, eccitato dall’alcol, dal divertimento e dalla magia di Parigi. Vuole assaporare la sensazione di speranza che nasce dall’incontro con una persona sconosciuta, qualcuna che vede solo il meglio di te, non il peggio.
Strength – real strength – is not doing what someone asks you, necessarily. Strength is turning up every day to a situation that is intolerable, unbearable even, just to support the people you love. Strength is being in that terrible room hour after hour even though every cell in your body is telling you it’s too much for you to cope with.
Strength is turning up every day to a situation that is intolerable, unbearable even, just to support the people you love.
She tries to imagine Carl getting his pubic hair lasered to make sure he was attractive enough for her, and it’s so unthinkable she laughs out loud. And now, because she is female and did all the things expected of her, she’s been discarded for a younger, supposedly sweeter model.
They sat in companionable silence, sipping their tea.
If you cannot fix it,” he says, “maybe you have to look at it differently.
But mostly I felt filled with horror. I was haunted by what I now knew. How could you live each day knowing that you were simply whiling away the days until your own death? How could this man whose skin I had felt that morning under my fingers – warm, and alive – choose to just extinguish himself? How could it be that, with everyone’s consent, in six months’ time that same skin would be decaying under the ground?
Oh, my God, my darling, how did you survive this man? “I guess it’s like the frog in boiling water, right?” Nisha says. “No marriage starts off bad. I guess by the time you realize how weird it’s gotten you’re up to your neck.