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Look, we are not unspectacular things. We’ve come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?
“I look ancient compared to you,” Lenora says most nights as they stare into the bathroom mirror, mother and daughter, side by side. Pulling the outer corners of her eyes up toward her hairline, Lenora adds, “And I’m supposed to just accept that you’re the new version of me.” Although Liz tries to sidestep the long shadow of her mother’s ever-cooling interest, it only becomes more and more difficult.
You can only use your head if you keep your eyes wide open.
“Life is one big running joke,” he tells her. “Don’t forget that.”
“To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift,”
Her father was her mother’s high school soccer coach. Mia shouldn’t be here. Or rather, if the world were a better place, she wouldn’t be here.
She has worked too hard and come too far to allow any man to change the course of her life. Even if it kills her, she will not be a victim.
She misses Ben. And parties. And the way her room remains just how she left it when she comes back from class, never pilfered through by little sister paws.
Life is merciless in that way, in its promise to end.
What Mia has gained in the loss of her mother is perspective. She understands she is on Earth for such an indefinite amount of time and that the only guarantee is that life is short and unreliable and that it is easy to get waylaid in daily stress that doesn’t ultimately matter.
A steady, ordinary life can be extraordinary so long as it’s centered around family and community and filled with love.
her childhood felt like an adult partnership with a woman who was still a kid herself.
life is fleeting and dangerously unfair.
It’s moments like these when Mia wishes Oliver weren’t an only child, wishes he could innately understand a sibling’s shared sense of ownership over everything, from phone chargers and sweaters to DNA to, most definitely, family real estate.
She is coming to understand that love and loss live on the same coin. It’s never heads or tails but joy and agony, grief and delight, spinning in the air, waiting on time and luck to determine not when this chapter ends but how the next one begins.
As ever, love demands sacrifice.
Cricket reminds herself, she has been treading water, which isn’t to say she’s been doing nothing. Because treading water means consistent, whole-body work, and actively deciding not to drown, and staying calm about not drowning, and continuing to push in one place even as fatigue settles in and threatens to pull her under or push her out.
The minutes and the days that add up to her life belong to her, and so it’s on her to make them count.
