Cackle

by Rachel Harrison

Maybe I’m letting my cynicism deprive me of a positive experience.

It’s so easy to adjust when you’re newly in love, when you’re all gooey, soft and malleable as an infant’s skull. You make so much space in your life and in your heart, and when the person you love leaves, you’re all stretched out. There’s so much room inside me that I don’t know what to do with, space I don’t know how to fill. I’ve been waiting for it to shrivel up, for me to take my former shape, to be how I was before I met him, but it’s not happening. It’s been so long; I don’t even remember who I was before him.

“you’ll discover for yourself soon enough the things that devastate us most in the moment are always the things we look back on with such gratitude.”

“We don’t have to do anything, darling. We’re free,” she says. “And freedom means doing what you want.

It’s best not to be specific with wishes. Otherwise, you end up getting what you think you want instead of what you really need. How dangerous.