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It is good you have each other, the artist had said, regarding them seriously as she worked. You never have to explain yourself to sisters.
She wanted to be a mother more than she wanted to be free. Or, rather, motherhood was the form of freedom she chose; not a life without pain, but a life assembled around it, love coupled forever with fear, a paper dollhouse built around an open flame.
Over time, her God became something more amorphous and expansive than the punitive Catholic God they were taught in school. It was a feeling of stillness that lived inside her. And, eventually, if she listened carefully enough, it spoke back to her. It or She or whatever God was had a voice barely above the sound of wind through sand. Bonnie could only hear it when she was very, very still. This is right for you, it would say. This is wrong. And when it spoke to her, she felt so supremely looked after, so deeply and existentially okay, its source could only be divine.
A lot was written about romantic love, Avery thought, about the profundity of that embrace. But this, too, was deserving of rapture, of song. Before she ever knew a lover’s body, she knew her sisters’, could see herself in their long feet and light eyes, their sleek limbs and curled ears. And, before life became big and difficult, there were moments with them when it was simply good: an early morning, still dark out, their parents asleep. Her younger sisters arriving one by one at her bedside, hair tangled, exuding their sour and sweet morning musk. She’d lifted the covers for each of them,
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