This Impossible Brightness

by Jessica Bryant Klagmann

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.

There’s a place for quiet people in this 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.

“Names are important. They give things significance. How do we talk about something without the damn words for it?”

Alma considered this. She had a box full of Alex’s things, and they were all precious to her, but she’d never thought of them as monuments before. She had his story, full of sorrow as it was, permanently intertwined with her own. That was a monument.

You write and you tell stories and nothing changes. You wonder what makes something worth the attention—how much of a disruption one would have to create to be of interest to science. To be of interest to the world. To be enough.

seems there could be more for you moving forward with the living instead of reaching back to the past.

They had been there before, and they were there again. They would always be there.