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She walks while listening to audiobooks or chatty, anodyne podcasts, anything to ensure she’s not alone with her thoughts.
If you didn’t want me to write shit about you, you should have been nicer to me.
She thinks sometimes that she always felt she was a little too much for him, too needy, too angry, too sad, too hysterical.
Will this be her in twenty years? So desperate for contact, or affection, that she is reduced to leaving culinary gifts on near-strangers’ doorsteps?
The key, I’ve found, to moving forward, is asking myself, during these moments: do I want to be right? Or do I want to be happy?
No, she thinks, better to keep a little prospect of something lovely for herself than to test it and lose it altogether.
Everyone tells her what she should be doing, or that it’s going to be all right, or that she needs to be less miserable, less moody, less angry, but nobody ever asks her that simple question.
‘Keep going. No feeling is final.’
Lila is basically the unwanted filling in the worst sandwich in the world.
She likes listening, realizes it’s rare that she gets to hear someone else talk about their life. It’s oddly restful to hear about someone else’s complications and mistakes.
It takes her two streets to realize that the unfamiliar feeling she is flooded with is hope.
It was like other people were their currency.
feeling grateful that one man in her orbit thinks she is an acceptable human.
She cannot hold it in, she cannot bear it all, because it is too much, always too much, all the bloody time.
There are periods of your life in which all that is really required is to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
There will be a part of yourselves that only ever remembers each other in that way.
This is life at this age, she muses, a million goodbyes, and you never know which are the final ones. You just absorb them, like little shocks, trusting with each one that you’ll be able to keep moving forward.
Sometimes she feels exhausted by all the feelings going on in her family all the time.
For months, perhaps years, she has been in permanent brace position, dipped low, her hands over her head, waiting for the next thing. The ups have been jagged, inconsistent, prone to turn abruptly into downs.
