When the World Goes Quiet

by Gian Sardar

Anger is something she’s only started to embrace. To be angry, you must feel. You must grasp the magnitude of loss or injustice—

Bombs and guns and starvation are obvious killers, but what loneliness does simply takes longer.

But the need to be right—to insist you are right—has caused more problems in the world than actually being wrong.

“All I know is I have been at my worst when my best was needed.”

“But male, female, you’re either an artist who does their art or one who doesn’t. And there might be a price for doing it, but I’ll tell you there’s a greater price for not.”

you need to do whatever you can to help yourself live, and to live with what happened.

“It’s too bad we’re not able to be friends with our parents before becoming their children, isn’t it?”

“Because you have nothing to do but suffer through it. And that’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s part of the punishment. You know they’d forgive you if they met you. You know that. The real issue is that you didn’t need it from them to begin with. You need it from yourself.”

I do not pretend to be a good man, but if I am bold enough to think I am deserving of any favors, it’s my hope that one day I’ll see you again, doing what you love.

What is it to want to be with someone whose life intersected so devastatingly with your own? Or maybe to want to be alone? Or, she realizes, to understand that there might be nothing wrong with a person who wants both.

What is it to be a mother, who knows that to save her child, she must lose her? To have the greatest gift be a future you will never be a part of? A future without, but because.