The Museum of Failures

by Thrity Umrigar

If something is not meant to be, you shouldn’t fight it. Because if you do, you may not like the outcome.”

Would he even choose these people as friends if he’d met them today? And yet there was something to be said for friends who knew you before your identity was formed, when you had only half emerged out of your shell.

All children believe that the world begins with their birth. But to be an adult was to acknowledge the endless circles of life that began before one’s time and would continue long after, to realize that one’s story was shaped and written by unknown others.

This was what held the world together, this unsung army of silently suffering standing women.