The Inexplicable Logic of My Life

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

She could be a storm. But she could be a soft candle lighting up a dark room.

“Maybe we don’t always know what we have inside us.”

But we have to find a way to discipline our hearts so that their cruelty doesn’t turn us into hurt animals.

The thing about tears is that they can be as quiet as a cloud floating across a desert sky. The other thing about tears is that they kind of my made my heart hurt.

I was thinking that I didn’t really want to grow up. But I didn’t really have a choice.

I guess life hurt everybody. I didn’t understand the logic of this thing we called living.

Some days you really have to push.

“I told you that there were only two things you needed to learn in life. You needed to learn how to forgive. And you needed to learn how to be happy.”

What if prayer disappeared from the world? Would the world still be okay?

I’m sorry to report that regrets are part of living.”

Show me a man without regrets and I’ll show you a man without a conscience.”

“Wouldn’t it be great, Sally, if we could just push the delete button in our brains and forget the times somebody hurt us?”

I guess there were some women who just knew how to make tortillas, who liked making them, who fed people with their art. I guess there were people walking around in the world who understood how to comfort people.

“You have to have faith,” she said.

Was there such a thing as being a little lost? I mean, if you were lost—​well, then you were lost. I didn’t know shit.

Maybe that’s what life was. You zigged and you zagged, and then you got up every morning and zigged and zagged some more.

Maybe people are heaven, Dad.

“Do you think the heart needs love to keep on beating?

“Déjate querer.” Let yourself be loved.

There was nothing wrong with getting angry. It was what you did with that anger that mattered.