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What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind? She has learned to step between the thorny weeds, but there are some cuts that cannot be avoided—a memory, a photograph, a name.
March is such a fickle month. It is the seam between winter and spring—though seam suggests an even hem, and March is more like a rough line of stitches sewn by an unsteady hand, swinging wildly between January gusts and June greens. You don’t know what you’ll find, until you step outside.
If she must grow roots, she would rather be left to flourish wild instead of pruned, would rather stand alone, allowed to grow beneath the open sky. Better that than firewood, cut down just to burn in someone else’s hearth.
she is still free. Free from courtship, free from marriage, free from everything except Villon. Left alone to grow.
The world should be getting larger. Instead, she feels it shrinking, tightening like chains around her limbs
There is a rhythm to moving through the world alone.
It would be an unconventional life, and perhaps a little lonely, but at least it would be hers. She would belong to no one but herself.
“I do not want to belong to someone else,”
“I do not want to belong to anyone but myself. I want to be free. Free to live, and to find my own way, to love, or to be alone, but at least it is my choice,
if it cannot be love, well, then, at least it is not lonely.
Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered? It’s like that Zen koan, the one about the tree falling in the woods. If no one heard it, did it happen? If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?
“Small places make for small lives. And some people are fine with that. They like knowing where to put their feet. But if you only walk in other people’s steps, you cannot make your own way. You cannot leave a mark.”
Blink, and you’re halfway through school, paralyzed by the idea that whatever you choose to do, it means choosing not to do a hundred other things, so you change your major half a dozen times
he assures you that you’ll find your calling, but that’s the whole problem, you’ve never felt called to any one thing.
“I don’t know who they want me to be. They tell you to be yourself, but they don’t mean it, and
Everyone thinks photography is truth, but it’s just a very convincing lie.”
“Yeah, well, being me hasn’t worked out so well.”
You waste so much time on people who don’t deserve you. People who don’t know you, because you don’t let them know you.”
“You can’t make people love you, Hen. If it’s not a choice, it isn’t real.”
“For all her talk of freedom, she was so lonely in the end.”
We all die alone.
It is the difference between tasting a peach out of season, and that first bite into sun-ripened fruit.
“Life can feel very long sometimes, but in the end, it goes so fast.”
