There is a blinding flash, a pain that rips through me for one searing instant, a silent scream from my broken body. For the first time, I can sense how fully agonizing staying will be.
Sometimes you make choices in life and sometimes choices make you.
I want to undo this. To make it right. But I have no idea how. I don’t seem to know how to open up to people without getting the door slammed in my face. So I do nothing.
Travelling is like a talent, like whistling or dancing. And some people have it.
I don’t hate you. I don’t think I ever really did. It was just anger. And once I faced it head-on, once understood it, it dissipated. -Mia.
It’s just one day, one twenty-four-hour period to get yourself through. – Adam.
Because that day with Willem, I may have pretended to be someone named Lulu, but I had never been more honest in my life. Maybe that’s the thing with liberation. It comes at a price.
She left for Juilliard the day after Labor Day. I drove her to the airport. She kissed me good-bye. She told me that she loved me more than life itself. Then she stepped through security. She never came back.
I’m also starting to wonder something else. If maybe the point of this crazy quest I’m on wasn’t to help me find Willem. Maybe it was to help me find someone else entirely.
The politeness was painful. I wanted to push through it, to return to the glow of the night of the concert, but I was unsure of how to get back there.
I don’t know how to be a friend. I don’t know how to be anything.
I realize it’s not just Willem I’m looking for; it’s Lulu too.
No one is who they pretend to be.
Willem holds my wrist for a long moment, looking at that birthmark. Then he lifts it to his mouth. And though his lips are soft and his kiss is gentle, it feels like a knife jamming into the electrical socket. It feels like the moment when I go live.
Travelling’s not something you’re good at. It’s something you do. Like breathing. You can’t work too much at it, or it feels like work. You have to surrender yourself to the chaos. To the accidents.
Why get stained when getting dirty is so much more fun.
Stains are even worse when you’re the only one who can see them.
He showed me how to get lost, and then I showed myself how to get found.
I realize then that it’s not enough to know what someone is called. You have to know who they are.
He can’t possibly live up to the person you’ve built him to be.
He gives me a little shrug, like, of course, why else? And at this point, I really have no right to be surprised by people’s capacity for kindness and generosity, but still, I am. I’m floored every time.