The Berry Pickers

by Amanda Peters

You never know when you might need kindness from people.”

If the spirit world does exist, it’ll be good to see those people I’ve lost.

There is a code among the dying: let the living speak. They have longer to atone for it.

There was love in that house, but none of us really knew what to do with it.

A place, like a person, takes on a certain quality when you’re going to get to know it intimately.

Some people, I have learned, are meant to read great works and others are meant to write them. Often, these are not the same people.

If children lose their parents, they are orphans. If a husband loses his wife, he’s a widower. But there’s no word for a parent who loses a child. I’ve come to believe that the event is just too big, too monstrous, too overwhelming for words. No word could ever describe the feeling, so we leave it unsaid.

Some wounds cannot be healed. Some wounds never close, never scar. But the further away from the injury, the easier it became to smile.

Prejudice runs deep and offers no apologies in small towns.

Grief can be wide and feel bottomless sometimes, but eventually, it begins to subside, to grow into something useful.

The need for conformity and for the attention of others can lead to a life of misery.

So many lies from the people I loved.

Light is more vibrant in the cold, like it knows that people are stuffed away in their houses, miserable from lack of sunshine, and it needs to put on a show.

I don’t cry anymore for my parents. I miss them, yes, but I think that as the ones we love get older, we just start to separate from them, like oil from water, a line separating the living and the dying, the living carelessly gathering at the top.

Alice once said that anger and sadness are just two different sides of the same coin.

“Anger is exhausting. Holding on to it will drain the life out of you.”

“Let those tears flow. Alice always said that holding in tears is like holding in pee—it’s gonna hurt eventually, so you might as well let them go as soon as you feel them.”