Nicholl McIntyre

“You were supposed to want that; she knew this. You were supposed to want everything for your kid and the dregs for yourself.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything. Some metal separates us from the void; death is so close. Life is everywhere, everywhere.sm”
― Samantha Harvey, Orbital

“Her partner in crime, Ben. The one who’d accompanied her complicitously through the darkest and most shameful moments of her adult life: cradled in her arms as she wandered woozily around the apartment at night, entertaining thoughts of disappearing while she slowly hummed him pop songs; strapped into the backseat while she wept in the parking lot of the Whole Foods; taking over when she got too tired to finish reading to him from Harry Potter, too young to read but making up the story as he saw fit—then he found a werewolf in the woods, and it was really funny and then really scary but mostly funny ha ha ha and then everyone went to bed, the end, Mama. Mama? “Mom,” he says now, and she wonders if he ever remembers the late-night times of his toddlerhood when she would creep in and lift him from his bed and rock him back to sleep in the glider, Mama’s nuts about you, chipmunk. Mama wouldn’t understand the world without you in it.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“just loneliness, loneliness at their respective outsets that colored everything else; or proximity, or passion; or hurting each other, or watching both their children leave the nest, or deciding to keep coming home to each other at the end of the day. Closeness and distance at the same time, antipathy and affinity, love and exhaustion. The way time moves, glacial and breakneck, the way two people fit together in a bed, in the hours after their son is born and the hours before his wedding.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was