The Sky Is Everywhere

by Jandy Nelson

It’s as if someone vacuumed up the horizon while we were looking the other way.

Grief is a house where the chairs have forgotten how to hold us the mirrors how to reflect us the walls how to contain us Grief is a house that disappears each time someone knocks at the door or rings the bell a house that blows into the air at the slightest gust that buries itself deep in the ground while everyone is sleeping Grief is a house where no one can protect you where the younger sister will grow older than the older one where the doors

no longer let you in or out

When I'm with him, there is someone with me in my house of grief, someone who knows its architecture as I do, who can walk with me, from room to sorrowful room, making the whole rambling structure of wind and emptiness not quite as scary, as lonely as it was before.

“That’s a misconception, Lennie, the sky is everywhere, it begins at your feet.”

Who wants to know we are just one carefree breath away from the end? Who wants to know that the person you love and need the most can just vanish forever?

I heard this expression once: Each time someone dies, a library burns. I’m watching it burn right to the ground.

Thank God I don’t have one of those. Who’d want a lust-o-meter sticking out the middle of their body?

I don’t believe time heals. I don’t want it to. If I heal, doesn’t that mean I’ve accepted the world without her?

You can tell your story any way you damn well please.

It’s your solo.

messessentialism instead of existentialism: for those who revel in the essential mess that is life.

there’s not one truth ever, just a whole bunch of stories, all going on at once, in our heads, in our hearts, all getting in the way of each other. It’s all a beautiful calamitous mess.

I will never stop grieving Bailey because I will never stop loving her. That’s just how it is. Grief and love are conjoined, you don’t get one without the other. All I can do is love her and love the world, emulate her by living with daring and spirit and joy.

If anyone asks where we are, just tell them to look up.

It’s such a colossal effort not to be haunted by what’s lost, but to be enchanted by what was.