Marrow

by Tarryn Fisher

I believe in loneliness so deep and profound it has a physical presence. I believe in choices—hard ones that people in charge seldom seem to get right. I believe that everyone needs something: a woman’s touch, companionship, money, forgiveness. And to acquire those things a person will accumulate as much sin as they need to.

School is a reprieve from home; home is a reprieve from school. I don’t belong anywhere, so I travel from place to place hoping no one notices me—but if they do, I hope they won’t be overly cruel.

I spend my whole life reading books that allude to happiness, when I refuse to experience it.

Sadness is an emotion you can trust. It is stronger than all of the other emotions. It makes happiness look fickle and untrustworthy. It pervades, lasts longer, and replaces the good feelings with such an eloquent ease you don’t even feel the shift until you are suddenly wrapped in its chains.

People want a different life, but they get pulled down by the same life their parents lived; same town, same poverty, same struggles. They have their own kids and remember the promise they made to themselves to get the hell outta Dodge. But, they don’t get out of Dodge, because it’s not that easy. So they take it out on themselves, their kids, their neighbors.

Nothing is better than the discovery of another living, breathing human, who fights the same as you do, loves the same as you do, and understands you with such clarity that it feels erotic.

it’s never stupid to dream. Dreams are plans; they get your heart moving, and once your heart gets moving, your brain will follow.”

Life is all about allowing people choices to be who they want. But the majority of people choose to be worthless.

The things that we never do because someone makes us fearful of them, or makes us believe we don’t deserve them.

Children shouldn’t have to suffer. To be alone. To feel unloved.

they are so broken they don’t even know that most of what they do reflects that brokenness. They just hurt whoever is in their wake. They don’t sit and think about what their hurt is doing to us. Pain makes humans selfish. Blocked off. Focused inward instead of outward.

“That’s because humans are built to live with pain. Weak people let their pain choke them to a slow, emotional death. Strong people use that pain, Margo. They use it as fuel.”

“You have to be willing to be happy. Despite the mess of your life—just accept what’s happened, throw away your ideals, and create a new map of happiness to follow.”

I hate that nothing can be done about the suffering of children, and that most of the world blocks out their suffering to cope with their own inability to help. The few who carry the burden, like social workers and teachers, become weary, burning out after only a few short years, forced to carry the weight that should be shared by a society. Children are vastly overlooked. Their importance underestimated by their size.

the truth of the matter—as I’ve come to understand it—is that people will ignore every warning sign when blinded by their thirst for something. It’s better to not be thirsty.

The loss of innocence is the most severe of growing pains.

We are all pretenders in life, finding a patch of humanity that we relate to, and then embrace it.

And the minute you realize that we are all pretenders is the minute everything stops intimidating you: punishment, and failure, and death. Even people. There is nothing so ingenious about another human who has pretended well. They are, in fact, just another soul, perhaps more clever, better at failing than you are. But not worth a second of intimidation.