Same As It Ever Was

by Claire Lombardo

Something that has always astounded her, particularly since her children were born, is how truly, consistently bad the universe is at time management; instead of meting out crises at manageable intervals it seems to deposit them in erratically spaced piles, like the salt trucks in the winter, each pile containing a rainbow of miscellaneous emergencies.

You could get used to not having someone in your life but you could never completely stop wanting them there.

because he’s supposed to know this; he of all people is supposed to know: that she isn’t a bad person, just occasionally bad at being a person.

She was not inordinately happy—it was not crazy happiness, not full-throated wild happiness—but it was there, a calm she wasn’t used to feeling, a sense of oneness with the world, with her days.