Expiration Dates

by Rebecca Serle

I like to bring a little of the forest with me wherever I go.”

I’m reminded every time I go out somewhere I haven’t been of how many hidden wonders there are

It’s hard to hold on to people the older we get. Life looks different for everyone, and you have to keep choosing one another. You have to make a conscious effort to say, over and over again, “You.” Not everyone makes that choice. Not everyone can.

If we might be able to judge not the strength of a person’s feelings but the measure of their care.

Everyone had a body that worked. Everyone but me.

couldn’t look at it because I thought seeing it would mean I’d have to acknowledge the truth: that I was damaged, that I’d never again be organized, tidy—fuck it, feminine. But I was wrong. Standing here now I see it. All the glorious reality that makes me who I am. A whole person. A

discombobulated whole, a whole that has been stitched and sutured and stapled, but a whole nonetheless.

We have to be cracked open sometimes. We have to be cracked open sometimes to let anything good in. What I see now, emerging in the mirror, is this one, simple truth: ...

We are all dying. Every day. And at some point it becomes a choice. Which one are you going to do today? Are you living or are you dying?”

there are more stars in the sky than there are grains of sand on earth. It seemed impossible. It always seems impossible to believe the things we cannot see.

My life has been filled with magical moments, I was just so busy waiting I didn’t see them when they were here.