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MY MOM ALWAYS SAID, “The bigger the love, the bigger the fights.”
my body ran for cover long before my mind could remind me I was safe.
Do you have to make such a big deal out of everything? they said. Do you have to be so sensitive?
Didn’t expect to see you here.” She says this every time. It’s not that she doesn’t expect me here, it’s that she wishes I weren’t.
I realize, with a start, that life has scurried past me.
It never occurred to me that it too would go gray. That it too would grow old. That this most private part of me that no one ever sees but me—because there is no one, there was never anyone before or after Vlaho—will be the place I mourn my youth the
she put her hands on her face, like she couldn’t deal with one more thing that day.
“So, am I crazy?” I asked. She lifted her head from her scribbles and said no. “Am I depressed?” She said no again. “So what is wrong with me?” And by this I meant, Why was it so hard for people to love me? Why had I been born with all these feelings inside me when they had nowhere to go, when there was no one else who wanted them? She said, “Nothing is wrong with you.”
if they aren’t inclined to love you, nothing you say or do, no amount of your own goodness, can make them change their mind.
I couldn’t help thinking that people just forget how to be present with one another.
Adoption was often the hot topic in the news because it was one of the most preposterous, most obvious examples of bureaucracy ruining people’s lives.
The darkness inside me spread.
The thing about feeling too much is that sometimes you have to force yourself to feel less. That in order to preserve your heart, you have to close it off, deliberately deny it its main function, and reduce it to a mere pump.
HAVING TO ARRANGE A funeral is a ploy to take the mourners’ minds off their grief.
