Say Goodbye for Now

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

Sometimes you don’t know exactly what it is but you know in your heart it’s not good.

“I was wrong,” he told the wolf-dog, who blinked steadily at him in the dim light. “Somebody still wants me around.”

They’re scared. Crazy world full of a bunch of people who are scared out of their wits over everything and playing a bunch of stupid games to fool you into thinking they’re not. Maybe even to fool themselves.

I refuse to let them pull me down to their level. I won’t let them turn me into them.

What did it mean to be friends in a world where just walking down the street

I haven’t had much experience being happy. Not in the family I came from originally and not the family I created. So here I am looking at this scene and feeling this feeling, and I seem to know somehow in some deep place that a family can be happy.

That being a person was not particularly scary. But now he was afraid to go home. And it was the same damned home.

I think you were right the first time. Being a person is just hard.” “Why doesn’t anybody say so, then?” “That’s a good question.”

The strange part of the feeling lay in the fact that just a few days ago it had felt like enough. Just the animals and the otherwise empty house. But she knew when it reverted to that status quo, when the company was gone, it would never be enough

I don’t like being alone any better than anybody else does. I just got confused because it was better than being with most of the people I’ve known.”

Our problem is coming to us from outside this house.”

It flitted through her mind without actual words that skin is an odd thing for the world to make a fuss about, especially when, with your eyes closed, it all feels more or less the same.

But dogs don’t regret what they didn’t do soon enough, or didn’t do enough of. Or what you didn’t do enough of. Dogs are where they are right now, in this moment, and nowhere else. Which is why I generally keep the company of dogs, she thought.

She’d long ago given up on any sort of God—probably while she was still a child—particularly the one forced on her by her parents. It seemed wrong to drag that relationship back into play now simply because she was afraid. It felt two-faced and selfish.

The way my dad and my mom are looking at each other in the picture, you and my dad look at each other like that.

But love takes more time. I think maybe I could love your dad, if we had more time and we let ourselves get to know each other. But I’m afraid we never will. We don’t dare,

First, shame. That deep, sickening shame that sits in your heart and reminds you that no one will love you if they know the whole truth. If they find out who you really are.

He had to say goodbye to his wolf-dog, and I told him he didn’t know whether Prince would stay away forever. I told him he should just say goodbye for now.”

Did life conspire to force you to do the very thing you said you would never do? And, if so, why?

Still, he felt far more worthy than he would have if he’d returned to the doctor’s house with a sad story instead of her bicycle.

the moment when life brought you to my door might not have been entirely random and accidental. I suppose it depends on your thoughts about life. In certain moments I suspect life knows exactly what it’s doing.

was just thinking how scary it is to leave everything behind and head out for a completely new life and not know anything about how it’s going to be. I wasn’t really thinking about it so much as feeling it.