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Everyone is claughing—that beautiful mix of tears and joy, crying and laughing and asking one another if this moment is really real.
At this, the nervous, nosy patients continue to nod with understanding, but only because they suddenly remember that the most beautiful people tend to be a little bit nuts.
“It’s like you’re this perfect souvenir from a city that no longer exists,”
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.”
Mia dutifully gulps down the electrolytes and her mother’s soccer dream because from the very first practice, she understands what the sport can provide: escape.
“To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift,”
The worst thing Mia ever did in her life was exist, and she’s been trying to make up for it ever since.
grief tattooed across her face like winter’s shadow.
And like any destination mythologized in youth, the beach strikes the Lowe sisters as less impressive now—instead of the ten-foot waves they remember, the ocean’s surface is glassy enough to host a slew of bobbing seagulls, mallards, and great cormorants. The rocky shoreline goes on for maybe a half mile, which contradicts their elementary school estimate of forever and ever.
But now, abandoned at the intersection of loss and crisis, she sees Nell and Landon and Ben as loose bonds of convenience, strung together by proximity and alcohol, lust and ambition.
Rather than strive to become as extraordinary as her mom could have been, Mia feels a growing desire to be entirely ordinary. The predictability feels safe, and the safety feels good.
the capacity to love strikes her as cruelly beautiful. At birth, each person unwittingly signs a contract to say goodbye to everyone they’re about to meet. Life is merciless in that way, in its promise to end.
Sacrifice has felt like love, and love like sacrifice, for as long as Mia can remember.
It isn’t rocket science, and it doesn’t require a degree from Yale, but it’s worthwhile.
A steady, ordinary life can be extraordinary so long as it’s centered around family and community and filled with love.
Because love always requires more than you think you have.
Commitment is not the same thing as sacrifice.
“Adulthood is constantly embarrassing.”
In the days leading up to the worst kind of anniversary, Cricket and Mia have both felt themselves getting pulled under by a riptide of resentment: Why her? Why them? Everyone is so scared of this virus, but we already lost everything.
A gray, overcast sky promises another wet day—the kind of damp cold that penetrates bones, making it impossible to keep warm. Appropriate grieving weather.
They want to remain right there, with their mom, in the center of the open wound, because the pain is entwined with the love, and the love is what conjures the stories and the jokes
This is why surprises are upsets.
it’s about using your body to trick your mind,
too attractive to also be so talented, like her parents double-dipped in the genetic fondue of good fortune.
Between sisters, the only thing louder than a screaming match is silence.
What good fortune to be spared one’s fortune.
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.
She feels like crying for a hundred reasons and no reason at all.
“I’d rather quit now and keep loving you,”
Like the flu, absolute demoralization is best suffered from the comforts of home.
The minutes and the days that add up to her life belong to her, and so it’s on her to make them count.
“You were always the rock—even when you were too young to be so steady.”
The mess is worth it. The mess is always worth it.
What good fortune to share our fortune.
