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steadfast with religion, but appreciate and enjoy the gift of life.
The promise of death, it seemed, had an uncanny way of rendering all other problems too small to care about.
“The artist deals with what cannot be said in words,” said Jeanne, quoting Ursula K. Le Guin on our first day of class. “The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.”
Nothing bonds people more, I think, than being forced to take violently loud bathroom trips while the others worriedly stand guard on the other side of the door.
When I was done, I felt different. I felt unbound. As if giving voice to my deepest fears had allowed me to face them, to see that they were nothing but that: fears. Not real, if I didn’t want them to be.
Things like stories, games—these are emotional houses from the random crap that happens in our lives.
But it’s hard to recognize love and all its forms when you’ve never seen it before. I was so sure that there was only one kind of “real love,” and that real love would be some big dramatic, storybook moment, a sudden flare of passion that would make itself known. What if it wasn’t that at all? What if love was a patient thing that simply stood at your side, offering you a hand? What if it was all the best of friendships—a partnership, a promise to face the unfeeling world and all its follies together? Or simply the quiet, intimate details of a person, like how their lips part when they sleep,
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Grief, I thought, was supposed to be beautiful in its own way. Like shards of ice on skin: a stingingly cold, delicate yet razor-edged proof of the love left behind. Instead, grief had obliterated me, leaving me so empty, so broken, I could hardly feel anything at all.
The satisfaction came when I’d reread what I wrote. Clumsy as my writing was, I loved seeing how the ideas that were once in my head had come alive on the page.
“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”
