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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 didn’t matter because as painful as it was, it had a name and it was real and it was her own.
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.
It wasn’t logical. It followed no science. Love rarely does.
“Hey, you can hide away as long as you’re happy. I’m not going to force you to come out.
“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?”
There’s a place for quiet people in this world. This seems like a pretty good one, even if it is slipping away.”
She covered her shoulder again, smiled for the camera, then lifted her cup for Alma to toast. “To the opposite of forever,” she said. Alma clinked her ceramic cup against Bea’s and quickly took a bite of the cookie so she wouldn’t have to think of the right words or say any words at all.
It was the kind of day she liked to recall, that reminded her she’d had a childhood to be nostalgic about. It wasn’t that she didn’t. It wasn’t that her home wasn’t full of love. She’d just gotten lost somewhere along the way, left behind, it seemed, by a fast, loud world.
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.
Always present, yet never the voice she was hoping to hear.
she was surrounded by an iridescent, impossible brightness.
Sometimes the impossible still happens to be the thing that makes the most sense.
It was selfish, Lucie knew, but some kind of gravity had lifted inside her when she realized she was no longer needed.
They stood as a reminder to him that there were things in this world that were steady, that lasted, even if they had broken down in the process.
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.
The truth is, the problem isn’t important enough. It doesn’t affect human communication enough to be worth anyone’s time. You write and you tell stories and nothing changes.
This is the life. If you don’t trust that it’s going somewhere, then it never will.”
It was such an impossible brightness that you thought you were glimpsing heaven.
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. They may have been able to move forward.
“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.”
Your first concern is that the lake has disappeared overnight. Your second is that it did not take you with it.
No one ever asked a mountain to do anything but be there, and a mountain never asked anything of anyone. You could be scared at the top of a peak, but the mountain would still be there under your feet, strong as ever. You could smile while standing on a mountain, and you didn’t have to have a reason.
“Everyone else seems to think I should. Like it’s the only way out of grief. Like wanting to be alone is a problem. Means I’m avoiding reality and there’s something wrong with me.”
Rien n’est éternel. Nothing lasts forever.
“The past is where I live and I like it that way,”
All great ideas are dangerous.
“Being remembered had meaning, and there is something not quite right about a person’s existence being extracted from the world.”
And it turned out the right words weren’t the kind that provided any comfort at all, but they were still the right words.
“We’re responsible for the wild things here. Someone has to be.”
“There’s a time for everything to leave the present and become history. We play our part, and then we step the hell out of the way and let whoever comes next build on whatever artifacts we’ve left behind.”
“We’re all responsible for our own happiness. That includes me. I’d be sorry to leave you behind, generally alone, if I didn’t think it would be the thing that made you happy too.”
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?
They had been there before, and they were there again. They would always be there.
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.
We never forgot, but we always moved forward.
The best we could do was
listen to them, speak for them, remind people of all the wonder and of all they had lost.
