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People are too complicated to be sympathetic, generally speaking. I’m not naive enough to believe my life would have been perfect if he’d stayed with my mother. It would have been weird and bitter in a different way, that’s all. Like I said, he tries. Sometimes I just can’t bear to be something he has to try quite so hard for.
Two young trees who bent around each other as they grew. Well, I’m a mighty oak now, Amelia. And I can’t bend. Not again. Not for anyone else.”
“I think it’s a thing that takes time, gray hair, wrinkles, heartbreaks, and all kinds of moments when you cared too much. Then one day you realize . . . it never got you anywhere you wanted to go. The people who only want you when you bend and twist to suit them don’t stay anyway, and the ones who want you as you are settle in, and so do you.”
“I like to read books with penises,” Alice says, waving a hand, not bothering to look up. “Because I don’t have them in my real life, and I don’t want them. They’re best in fiction.”
“Falling in love when everything is terrible is as brave an act as blowing shit up. Except it’s something regular, everyday people can choose to do. A radical act of real-life bravery.”
Don’t postpone joy. I was in pain, and I had every reason to wait until I healed to start enjoying sunsets and pie and new friends. I took it as a sign from the universe. To try to let the joy exist alongside grief.
My heart has been shattered in just so many pieces that what I managed to do when I moved to Rancho Encanto was take those pieces and put them back together. Like a stained-glass suncatcher you might find in any of the gift shops around town. Beautiful, but not in its original condition.
“We can always lose something. Hell, we can always lose everything. I think the truly miraculous thing about life is that we keep loving anyway.”
“See, this is why I do think romance novels are realistic, Nathan. Things just happen in a different order. In real life we have a spate of issues, and we don’t know where they all come from. But they always show up. We date the same people who are the same kind of wrong, we fall into the same bad patterns with work, with personal habits. We fail our friends in the same ways, and we have the same fights with our significant other. Over and over again. Each and every time we have to hit these mini crises, and if we want to move past them, we have to drain a little poison out of the wound. A
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“In romance you drain the poison out. In one big cathartic fight. One catastrophic loss. The loss of the person who showed you that you needed to heal, and you have to let the poison go to be happy. It’s the same process. It just takes a little more time.”
The sad truth is, you protect the wound, and it begins to protect you. So you guard it at all costs.
“Everybody dying is easy,” Nathan says. “I’m not an aficionado of romance novels, though I have now read a couple and listened to Amelia give some fascinating commentary on the topic. I have to say, both of the books I’ve read have felt pretty real. It shows people dealing with issues and living. That’s what we all have to do, deal with shit and keep going. If you want to kill everybody off and let them be dead, then I would suggest that you actually want a more digestible reality.”
“That’s the messy part. Bad things happen and people have to go on.
The thing about grief is . . . it makes you so tired. It makes you way too tired to put on a facade.
Endings move on a continuum. One thing ends, something else begins.
A blank page has limitless possibilities, but at the same time, it’s nothing.
I’m different, and my life is different than I planned for. Different doesn’t make it wrong, or bad, or failed. When I accepted that, I found a lot more peace.”
child is a promise of a whole world,”
“When you lose a pregnancy, a child, you lose that world. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t real. It doesn’t mean it didn’t matter.”
life is made up of pain and loss. That the happy endings happen between the unbearable.
I’m very good at running, Nathan. The thing about running is it’s not closure. It’s just leaving things behind. But if you run too fast, you leave the door open, and all kinds of shit follows you. Whether you mean it to or not. Letting shit follow you isn’t the same as working it out either.”
“You should never be anything less than the love of someone’s life,
“What if I can’t have everything?” “You’ll survive. You’ll keep on living. You’ll smile again. You’ll dream again. You get to be my age, and you realize that you had everything that was meant for you. So you might as well want it all, then see what comes.”
“It’s a lesson, though, isn’t it? You can’t make yourself safe. Existence is risk. Caring is dangerous.”
“Life makes it really hard to hope for things.” “That’s why happy endings are so hard,” I say. “But people don’t value it. They think it’s easy.”
The work that goes into a happy ending is the hardest work. The world doesn’t value it. The work to be in love, the work to be happy. It’s the hardest work, but I’m willing to do it.
