Beautiful Ugly

by Alice Feeney

My books have always been a place to hide myself inside myself when the real world gets too loud. Marriage is made of a million beautiful and ugly moments stitched together into a shared tapestry of memories, all of which are viewed and remembered slightly differently, like two people staring at the same painting from opposite ends of a room. I

People rarely do what they say they will or what they should. The only thing I don’t like about being alone is the amount of time it forces me to spend with myself.

Some people think hiding their grief will make it go away, but in my experience it only makes it hurt more. Grief is only ever yours; it’s not something you can share,

Grief is a patient thief and steals far more than people who have never known it realize.

“Success is often the result of a series of failures. Try to remember that. You never learn anything from success, but failure can

teach you everything about a person.

could—but I wasn’t really living. Merely existing inside my own head. Then grieving for everything and everyone I have lost.

Over the last ten years I let my relationships with real people drift while I obsessed over fictional ones.

I glance down to see what he is growling at—it turns out he was looking in the same direction as me, at her—but when I turn back, she is gone. It all happened so fast that it feels like I might have imagined it, but the woman I saw was the spitting image of my missing wife.

“People rarely know what they have until they lose it. They spend their lives searching for a better one, wanting more, needing more, blind to the fact that they already had it all. I think sometimes it’s only when something gets taken from a person that they appreciate what they had.

I want to tell Sandy that when it comes to the people you love, you can’t live without them. But I don’t. I keep my thoughts to myself because silence cannot be misquoted.

In my experience, there is no such thing as a random order of events; everything happens when it happens for a reason, even if the reason is hard to see at the time.

do what I always do after meeting someone I like. I replay the conversation in my head, reliving all the moments I wish I could change, hoping I wasn’t quite as awkward as

I fear I might have been, and thinking of all the things I should and could have said better.

Wives think their husbands will change but they don’t. Husbands think their wives won’t change but they do.

I thought this island was the perfect place for a writer. It all seemed so nice. But places, like people, can often seem nice at first, until you get to know the real them and see them for what they are.

Life is beautiful and life is ugly and we have to learn to live with both sides of that same coin and see the light in the darkness. The world is Beautiful Ugly, relationships are Beautiful

Ugly, love is Beautiful Ugly. Understanding that makes life easier to live with.”

I tend to beat myself up when I don’t get things quite right. I so badly want to be good at what I do, but that determination to do better, be better, is sometimes overwhelming. It makes me withdraw into myself, pull away from the people who have chosen to love me.

It sometimes feels as though life has passed me by and I wonder if other people feel that way too. Surely it can’t only be me. I don’t remember when the years started to speed up, but they did. Seasons tumbling into each other, days disappearing into weeks, weeks into months. I can’t seem to slow life down but I can’t keep up with it either. The markers that are so familiar to me: New Year, family birthdays, Halloween, Christmas, all come around too fast. No matter how hard I try to stay one step ahead I am always behind schedule in the story of my life. I feel old, even though I’m not, and I constantly feel like I’m running out of time.

“Nobody said it was easy, but love is always worth fighting for, isn’t it? I think maybe it’s the only thing worth fighting for.”

I like to think of myself as a cheerful pessimist. Life is less depressing if you accept that people will always disappoint you.

But I do, so I remind myself what my nana always told me when I was scared as a child: there’s no need to be afraid of the dead, it’s the living you have to watch out for.

“Men still rule this world and as a result the world is broken. Men still hold most positions of power, men control governments, men control the media, and it is always men who start wars. Men have tricked women into thinking they see us as equals, but real equality, for all women everywhere, still feels like little more than a pipe dream.