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She was an extraordinary woman, and I went to bed that night feeling like I was perhaps more than ordinary myself. This was the effect she had on me.
I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.
one is well served by a degree of both humility and charity when judging the inner workings of another person’s heart.
They say, Find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind. And now that I had fulfilled mine, I felt aimless and adrift.
life. I know now that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse.
that if an avalanche buries you and you’re lying there underneath all that snow, you can’t tell which way is up or down. You want to dig yourself out but pick the wrong way, and you dig yourself to your own demise. That was how I felt, disoriented, suspended in confusion, stripped of my compass.
The rope that pulls you from the flood can become a noose around your neck. People always disappoint Mamá in the end, me included. They can’t make good on what they owe, not the way Mamá expects them to.
they already understood each other, perhaps better than I did either of them. Mamá respected Thalia too much to coddle her. She would not insult Thalia with false assurances.
“It’s a funny thing, Markos, but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really what guides them is what they’re afraid of. What they don’t want.”
It was the kind of love that, sooner or later, cornered you into a choice: either you tore free or you stayed and withstood its rigor even as it squeezed you into something smaller than yourself.
“But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.”
But she had also very deep sadness. All my life, she gave to me a shovel and said, Fill these holes inside of me, Pari.” I nod. I think I understand something of that.
They tell me I must wade into waters, where I will soon drown. Before I march in, I leave this on the shore for you. I pray you find it, sister, so you will know what was in my heart as I went under.
