Of himself Grant said, “I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person. Or he became me. Or we met at some point.
Someone’s in here,” I called, though that was obvious. Someone was in here. It was me. I was here. I felt in a way I hadn’t in ages: the me inside of me, occupying my spot in the fathomless Milky Way.
I want you to have it because I can see that you walk with the spirits of the animals, with the spirits of the earth and the sky.
He taught you how to love like you’ve never loved before. He taught you how to suffer like you’ve never suffered before. Perhaps the next thing he has to teach you is acceptance. And the thing after that, forgiveness.
When my son was six he said, “We don’t know how many years we have for our lives. People die at all ages.” He said it without anguish or remorse, without fear or desire. It has been healing to me to accept in a very simple way that my mother’s life was forty-five years long, that there was nothing beyond that. There was only my expectation that there would be – my mother at eighty-nine, my mother at sixty-three, my mother at forty-six. Those things don’t exist. They never did.
You say your marriage is “loveless” and perhaps you’re correct that your relationship has come to its natural end, but I’d like you to consider the notion that you aren’t the best judge of that right now. You’re a psychologically distressed drug addict with four kids, no health insurance, uncertain business prospects, and a pile of bills. I wouldn’t expect your marriage to be thriving. I doubt you’ve been.
My two grown sons, ages thirty-five and twenty-three, have returned to the nest, my home. They didn’t ask. They simply showed up.
Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters.
I stopped at the door where the racks of Snapples were kept. I put my hand to the glass near the bottles of lemonade – there was both yellow and pink. They were like diamonds or pornography. I could look, but I couldn’t touch.
I’m not suggesting one deny negative emotions, but rather that you accept them and move through them by embracing the power we have to keep from wallowing in emotions that don’t serve us well.
It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets.
I’d silently send my love to them across the universe in the way people have sent their silent love across the universe to the people they love throughout all time, and I would know in my heart that they had received it. I would be at peace.
I think I cry because it always strikes me as sacred, all those people going by. People who decided simply to live their truth, even when doing so wasn’t simple.
Doing what one wants to do because one wants to do it is hard for a lot of people, but I think it’s particularly hard for women. We are, after all, the gender onto which a giant Here to Serve button has been eternally pinned.
But I want you to know that you don’t need to tell me this to get me to love you. You don’t have to be broken for me.
I still can’t entirely explain why I needed to leave my ex. I was tortured by this very question for years because I felt like such an ass for breaking his heart and I was so shattered I’d broken my own. I was too young to commit myself to one person. We weren’t as compatible as we initially seemed.
Most of their stories were, like Geraldine’s, more mundane – young love for which they alone had paid the price.
She’d kept the secret sealed so tightly inside her for so long it could not be extracted without altering who she was, she realized now. The secret was not separate from her. In the telling of it, she’d come undone.
We like to pretend that our generous impulses come naturally. But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first.
She couldn’t help but think that she’d ruined his life. It didn’t yet occur to her to wonder about having ruined her own.