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My mother was a woman who was always impatient to be somewhere else, even when she’d just arrived.
We can never know the importance of our actions, however small and innocent they might seem. An interaction that, for us, is gone in a heartbeat might be something that another person finds impossible to forget.
We are shaped by our pasts, not defined by them. It was important to remember that.
“It must be hard talking to people who’ve done things like that. Especially after what happened to you all those years ago.”
When you’re young, there’s so much time left ahead of you. You can still achieve something. But then suddenly you realize
that time is mostly behind you now, and there’s only the fact that you didn’t.
Maybe that happens to all of us in time, I’d thought. We slow down a little. We loosen our knots. We learn to find pleasure in the smaller, softer moments.
People can hide things away from you
in the spaces between seconds, never mind weeks and months.
My defense mechanisms had served me well in so many ways, but they had also protected me from so much more than I needed them to. They were like old friends who had kept me safe once, but who kept sabotaging me now. I knew I should let go of them, but I didn’t know how. Perhaps a part of me was even scared of doing so.
“I go for a cigarette break every hour,” Darren Field (19) told police. “I watched them arrive, and I watched them leave.”
The idea that our lives are all separate journeys, and that we just intersect occasionally in places a step aside from them, before carrying on again in our different directions.
Because we want everything to make sense. But sometimes … things are just fucking shit.”
If you took the bad on the chin without flinching then the same should be true of the good. Whatever anyone else thinks of you, it should be enough for you to know that you’re enough.
