Kindle Notes & Highlights
She so desperately wanted children in order not to be a child herself but a mother. No longer a daughter but a mother, and the children grounded her, stopped her from floating up into the air or imploding because she didn’t know who she was. How can someone who was never whole know where the missing piece lies?
He can’t live with uncertainty, he writes. Personally, he always seeks clarity. Doubting, wondering are not for him. He can handle someone upsetting him, he writes, but not the state of being upset.
They drive from Imintanoute towards the coast, and suddenly they see it. It seems overwhelming so close to the equator. She takes in the panoramic view. The sea arches as if spilling over the curvature of the Earth. Endless in every direction, an awe-inspiring dark blue foaming mass.
Love is only possible where there is innocence, a tiny little bit of innocence, a little bit of trust. The knowledge that you can’t be substituted, that you are not replaceable or interchangeable, that the hands of the beloved and a stranger can’t be the same, that they can’t touch a stranger in the same way they touch someone familiar and loved, that hands, when they can choose, will always choose the beloved.
When you are in pain, when you can’t take any more, go to the shore and throw pebbles into the sea. One after the other and feel how you slowly become unburdened. She goes to the shore and throws pebbles into the sea, one after the other, it helps a little, she picks them up and she throws them. She sits on the shore with a sheep’s fleece around her shoulders as darkness falls on this already dark Sunday in November.
