More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
But if self-doubt and fear are holding me back—it’s more reason to jump in headfirst.
don’t know if it’s the scent of the ocean, or if my body knows the twists of the road, or if Summer Wind is imprinted on me at a cellular level, but I can feel when we’re almost there.
Just seeing it feels like taking a deep breath.
Everything that’s worth having is some trouble. —L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea
“If there’s one thing I can teach you, Lucy,” Stacy said as I sobbed into my wine, “it’s to live your life fully, to live it for yourself and no one else. I know how much you love this place, but I have to do what’s right for me, just as you have to do what’s right for you.”
“That’s not horse shit—that’s the truth. Opportunities don’t fall in your lap because you want them to. You have to work to make them happen.”
“Live your life for you, and no one else” was one of my aunt’s signature pieces of wisdom. But what if you aren’t sure what you want? Or what a full life looks like?
“Sometimes I worry that as I’ve got older, I’ve shrunk my world instead of making it grow,” I admit. “Picking flowers, making floral crowns, mucking in my aunt’s garden—those things used to be my hobby, but now my aunt is gone, and my hobby is my job, and work is my entire life.”
“Look at how many lives she touched. This is a happy ending.”
Bridget moved into Miles’s condo that fall, and the transition was harder than I’d expected. As roommates, we spent countless nights dancing in our socks in the kitchen, talking until our voices grew hoarse and our eyelids drooped. I made hot toddies and mashed bananas on toast when she was sick; she held my hand while I cried. But now she had her big job and her live-in boyfriend. As the future sprawled before us, a tendril of fear curled around my spine. We were getting older. We were growing up. The day had come when we wouldn’t dance in our socks in the kitchen anymore.
“You don’t sound like you’ve been relaxing,” Farah says. “You sound like a sewer rat.”
I heard my mom sigh. “It sounds fun. You’ve had so much fun.” “I have.” There was a shuffling of sheets, and then I heard my aunt say softly, “Don’t cry, Cheryl. I’m the one dying.”
I loved you like you were my own.
sometimes weeping, sometimes smiling into the sun.
“We’ve already got one of me. We need you to be exactly like you.”
I tell Bridget she’s my best friend. I tell her that I’ll miss her. I tell Bridget that I love her more than anyone. And then I let go.
We became adults together. Our friendship is how I learned to compromise. It’s how I learned that the families we make are as significant as the ones we’re born into. It’s how I learned that the greatest loves are not always romances.”
I used to think doing things on my own was the highest of achievements, and it is fulfilling, but asking Felix for help doesn’t make me feel smaller. When I’m with him, anything seems possible. It’s almost drugging, how powerful I feel. How sacred and adored. On the evenings when we’re so tired all we can do is curl up on the couch in silence, Felix reading while I watch TV, I don’t worry that we’re tiptoeing toward monotony. I don’t feel like a piece of furniture. I just feel lucky.
