The Orphanage by the Lake

by Daniel G. Miller

Ah, the morning. Is there anything worse?

It’s not that I’m unattractive. It’s just that when you used to be better, everything about you feels worse.

The assault doesn’t end when the attack ends. It stays with you, hiding behind every door you open, every corner you turn, even haunting your dreams.

“The second you stop learning is the second you stop being a good private investigator,”

But the world tends to take our hopes and dreams and steadily beat them down until they become something else entirely.

The abusers always blame everyone and everything but themselves.

Chili runs down my face just as a cute guy passes me with a look of mixed curiosity and disgust. That pretty much sums up my luck with men.

One of the first rules of being a private investigator is don’t trust your client. Half of what they tell you is a lie, and the other half is half-true.

The ultimate New Yorker pet peeve is the tourist who goes from full stride to full stop in the middle of foot traffic. We need special prisons for these people.

Same, and I'm not a new yorker

But part of being a young woman in an older man’s world is picking your battles, and this is one I won’t win. Sometimes you have to eat shit.

The old high school insecurities come back, and I fight the urge to smell my dress and open the windows. People think that we’re defined by the big moments in our lives: births, deaths, successes, and failures. But I think the little moments matter more because those are the moments that shape your self-perception and who you want to become.

“You can hope for the good times, but it’s the bad times that make you.”

It’s sad, but if no one is complaining, nobody really cares about what happens to a child.”

It’s what we can’t see that scares us.

Fear is like a cancer—it starts with an actual moment but then multiplies and gains hold of you until it’s bending your experience of everything around you.

‘To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.’