Entitlement

by Rumaan Alam

The effect was of a woman in disguise, but all workplaces demand pantomime from their inhabitants.

To be anything but proud of living however long you made it was empty vanity, one of men’s tools for keeping women in check.

“Brooke, if you don’t ask for what you’re owed, who can you blame when you fail to get it?”

what was parenthood but the polishing of another into something like a mirror?

She admired Paige’s love of beauty but knew there was more to life. You were what you did in the world, not what you collected.

The people who are obsessed with money aren’t the rich who have it or the poor who don’t. They’re us. They’re the big middle, it’s all the rest of us, because we know what money can do. We know how we’ll never get our hands on it, but we know it could make us free.”

She wanted safety in a mad world. She wanted what people most wanted and was the thing that rich people hoarded: not money, but the grace of God and the universe, a way to be in the world and enjoy it. She wanted selfhood.

So often, she thought herself strange, or different, or apart. She was too young to understand that how she felt was simply how most people felt, at least on occasion, when they were being most honest with themselves.

“You’ll never get over this, Asher. This is who you are now. Bereavement mellows. It never vanishes. It’s not an absence or a lack even. It’s more present than that. It’s a change. That’s life’s nature. It changes.”

The thing that makes life interesting is that it ends. The thing that makes love worthwhile is that it’s all we’ve got.”