More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Travel is a way of turning the page,
She hates that she always feels ridiculous trying to wear her own anger—like it’s the wrong size after too many winters spent at the back of her closet.
she threw herself into her work and presented her achievements like bargaining chips in her social circles—
“I guess I’m afraid of being responsible for someone who never asked for me. And I don’t want to do it alone.”
“And I worry, when I see people who knew me then, that they still see me the same way.
“You feel a lot of responsibility for other people’s feelings,” her therapist once told her, as she described the careful little ways she frames her life for her parents.
You can still get hurt with your eyes wide open.”
She spends so much of her time experiencing a low-grade resentment toward them, over a million little injustices from childhood that don’t really matter anymore, she’s forgotten this feeling—when she’s happy, and they’re happy, and they feel like what she thinks of when she thinks of a happy, loving family.
“You can’t really prioritize the things you need to if you’re wasting precious energy on your tortured personal life, as romantic as it may feel in the moment.”
He would have reminded her to stop sometimes, to look back on how far she’d come and take some time to enjoy it. And she’d have helped him to keep walking past the familiar peaks he’d already climbed and circled before, urging them both onward. Come on, there’s a better view just around the corner.
If loving Helen—even if it was never really his right to love her in the first place—means he gets to carry some version of her with him forever. She hopes he’ll get over this. He doesn’t want to get over this, over her, at all. He wants to hold on to this hurt and wrap it in plastic and store it somewhere safe, because it’s probably all he’ll ever have left of her.
doesn’t feel like home anymore, and she misses him so much her heart hurts all the time, and she loves him so much she sometimes can’t fathom a world where she’s ever truly happy again.
“We need a lot of things, and there isn’t enough space for everything to be convenient,”
You’re the demon I don’t want to exorcise. If I heal and move on, I’m worried I’ll finally lose you for good. But I want to be healthy. And I want to be happy, though I’ve never trusted happiness. To me, happiness is a fleeting, heartbeat-to-heartbeat experience that comes and goes and hopefully comes back. I worry happily-ever-afters don’t exist for people like us.
The kind of ending where I don’t have to leave you behind even as I move forward, because you’re always a part of me—even if that part feels like a hole in my heart.
The kind of ending where someone else sees the best and worst of me and loves me back. We’d be happy together, we’d be sad together, we’d be everything together. And when it’s all over and we’ve reached another ending, my ashes would be scattered over the tree that grows from his body because till death do us part wouldn’t be enough, because I’d need more than one brief eternity with him.
