The Berry Pickers

by Amanda Peters

“People will be someone other than themselves if they have people who rely on them,”

MARRIAGE IS A FUNNY THING. THERE ARE SO MANY people in the world, and you decide to commit the rest of your life, the rest of your emotional energy, to just one. You assume that the mysterious connection that ties you to one another will hold. A connection that can’t be trusted, one that

probably manifests in that same mystical space where stories come from. A place that allows you to suspend your disbelief. Marriage assumes that you will bend and twist and adjust to one another. It assumes that your desires will forever be interconnected by the placement of a piece of gold around a finger.

felt an essence of normalness return.

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

Or maybe I’m just one of those people who are only happy when they aren’t. Maybe I find contentment in my own misery.

It’s a tragedy that we only come to these understandings when we’re too old for them to be useful.

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.”