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The running part was accurate enough, but the truth that was impossible to explain was that she was running toward her grief and away from everyone else.
It was a hard thing to do at times, striding headlong into memories that caused her heart to implode. But it was far easier than letting go.
It was a good place to be sad, and sadness was what she’d expected. She settled in, let it roll into her like ocean waves into an empty shell, soaking her heart in salt water that burned and soothed all at once.
Those dreams were painful to wake up from, but she always wanted them to return because when they were happening, there was no one there to tell her that it wasn’t real.
They’d had their share of sorrow just as she had, and were well versed in the unpredictable way grief operated inside a soul.
“I always wonder, Isn’t being a good listener worth anything? Can’t you do something good for the world without standing in a crowd or shouting from a podium?”
Breaking away from one life for another did not leave a clean edge—not on either side. She could have a nice childhood and a loving family and still need to leave it behind. Both things could be true. And escape was not without its regrets.
She couldn’t be around people, but she couldn’t be in remote places either. It wedged her into a special kind of isolation—a kind that, she realized now, was the wrong kind.
Jupiter was gone. This was not something she could allow herself to believe, and yet she knew it to be true. She watched his still body, waiting to see that she was mistaken. Waiting for him to breathe again, to twitch, anything.
Write for yourself, not for someone else, not for an audience. If you truly love to write, if you have to write, you’ll do it even if no one else ever sees it.
“When it comes down to it, we’re all just a culmination of experiences. And when we lose those, what do we have?
a book wedged beneath a lamp so the bulb pointed upward. The book was The Light on the Way Down, by Hayden MacKenna.
It may have been better for them to have argued. If they had, truths may have come out, apologies may have flowed, and forgiveness may have been granted.
“It is agonizing, the disposition of the human mind to construct obstacles in one’s own path, when the world itself has given us none. Life is so much easier than you think, Hayden MacKenna.”
She liked people, but if she could be invisible, if she could be a part of things without the pressure of having to talk, she would.
No one ever asked a mountain to do anything but be there, and a mountain never asked anything of anyone.
She didn’t say so then, but Lucie’s case of the many star systems out there didn’t provide comfort. It only made the universe seem that much vaster.
“We’re all responsible for our own happiness.
Is all of life, she wondered, simply one long journey narrowing in on those particular people who bring you peace, only to have them taken away?
I wished I could say something to her, reassure her in some way that what she’d done had meant a lot. That her life had meant a lot. That people leave in the middle of a path sometimes, and we have to keep walking. That small things done with great love become great things.
