If I shut my eyes, I believed, I would disappear. To make it through, I had to be present the whole time.
I had begun to chase my husband as I had once chased my mother, toe to toe, a shadow girl trying to be what I thought they wanted me to be. I.
He wore his own innocence like a comfortable old coat.
The niggling idea of what she would do as Ray grew older and her husband worked increasingly long hours crept up the inside of her foot and along her calf to the back of her knee and began to climb into her lap.
Confucius-says.
So much in life is about almosts, not quites.
Soon she noted that teachers in subjects besides gym didn’t report her if she cut. They were happy not to have her there: her intelligence made her a problem. It demanded attention and rushed their lesson plans forward.
I had taken this time to fall in love instead – inn love with the sort of helplessness I had not felt inn death – the helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human – feeling as you went, groping in corners and opening your arms to light – all of it part of nagivating the unknown.
News slipped out and the world didn’t explode and eventually I could count on passing out. I had a headache in the morning and I always threw up, but Jamie, and everyone, it seemed, liked me when I was drunk. The added bonus: I often didn’t remember much.
My father dreamed that one day he might teach another child to love ships in bottles. He knew there would be both sadness and joy in it; that it would always hold an echo of me.
We’re here, you know... All the time. You can talk to us and think about us. It doesn’t have to be sad or scary.
They were all things she would not give away in New York, where she watched others tell their drunken bar stories, prostituting their families and their trauma for popularity and booze. These things, she felt, were not to be passed around like disingenuous party favors.
The air inside the station wagon was cold and fragile. I could see the moist air when he exhaled, and this made me want to palpate my own stony lungs.
He walked in the room like a ghost and like a ghost slipped in between the sheets, barely creasing them. He was not unkind in the ways that the television and newspapers were full of. His cruelty was in his absence. Even when he came and sat at her dinner table and ate her food, he was not there.
What I’d been missing was a wanderlust that came from letting go?
No one knew how he continued to do what he did, while simultaneously they wanted him to shut all signs of his grief away, place it in a file somewhere and tuck it in a drawer that no one would be asked to open again.
Like someone who has survived a gun-shot, the wound had been closing, closing – braiding into a scar for eight long years.
Give that love to the living.
When people asked Hal when he was going to grow up, he said, “Never.
The end came anyway.
That was the line my father said to my mother: “Nothing is ever certain.