When We Were Widows

by Annette Chavez Macias

I had a bad habit of shutting people out when I didn’t feel like baring my soul—or being judged about what my soul would expose about me.

“Some people believe—like me—that we’re connected to certain people because they’re meant to be in our lives, meaning you’re destined to have some sort of experience with them,” Evie explained. “Sometimes we meet these people before we’re supposed to. Kind of like a ‘wrong time, wrong place’ sort of thing. So we drift apart, only to be pulled back together again by an invisible string when the universe decides you’re both ready to be in each other’s lives again.”

My mother always told me the secret to a good meal was that you couldn’t be angry or sad when you were preparing it.

Sometimes we have to do things we’ve never done in order to grow. Because when you stop growing, you die.”

“The past is the past,

The only thing you have the power to change is the present. For Yesica and for you.

Grief, I’d learned, didn’t have a finish line. It was an endless journey. Some days the path was easy, and other days you’d be running perfectly fine and then, out of nowhere, you’d stumble, and the pain would come roaring back as if your loss had just happened.