Before I liked to write, I liked to type. I remember visiting my grandmother Adele in Ponce Inlet, Florida, when I was three years old, and she had an IBM electric typewriter.
It was a nice day, and I don’t mean that it was sunny either. It was humid and not too cool, like winter was getting annoyed with itself and wanted it to be spring just as much as everyone else.
On, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that’s not how it works. A human life is a beautiful mess.
Betty inhales sharply, ‘It’s just I thought I had lost you forever.’ Oh, Betty, don’t you know there’s no such thing as forever?
If you are going to forgive a person, Liz decides, it is best to do it sooner rather than later. Later, Liz knows from experience, could be sooner than you thought.
On Elsewhere we fool ourselves into thinking we know what will be just because we know the amount of time we have left. We know this, but we never really know what will be. We never know what will happen...
There is no difference in quality between a life lived forward and a life lived backwards, she thinks. She had come to love this backward life. It was, after all, the only life she had.
It’s difficult to ever go back to the same places or people. You turn away, even for a moment, and when you turn back around, everything’s changed.
Life used to move much more quickly when I was a girl. We needed to abbreviate just to keep up.
It wasn’t even 8:00 yet. Pretty early for such deep thoughts.
It’s sad when you think about it, but also kind of beautiful.
Should have. Would have. Could have. Didn’t.
Daddy always said the only thing worth begging for was your life, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe sometimes your love is a little bit worth begging for, too.
It’s a weakness to apologize before hearing what the other person’s grievances are. You don’t want to end up creating new grievances where there were none to begin with. Another Daddy-ism, if you hadn’t already guessed.
Tragedy is when someone ends up dead. Everything else is just a bump in the road. For the record, that was something Daddy used to say.
My heart was a little bit broken, but I still had to go to school. I buttoned my dress shirt over it and my winter coat, too. I hoped it didn’t show too much.
And when she dreams, she dreams of a girl who was lost at sea but one day found the shore.
I met a travler from an ancient land.
Saying you’re through with romance is like saying you’re done with living, Betty. Life is better with a little romance, you know.
I let myself feel good and sorry for myself, but only for a second. Daddy always said that the most useless of all human emotions was self-pity.
Maybe if I’d been braver in that moment, I would have cried.