Into the Water

by Paula Hawkins

I was very young when I was cracked open. Some things you should let go of Others you shouldn’t Views differ as to which —Emily Berry, “The Numbers Game”

We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection. —Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations

The things I want to remember I can’t, and the things I try so hard to forget just keep coming.

The places where hopeless people go to end it all, cathedrals of despair.

People think the sight’s crystal clear, but it isn’t as simple as all that.

I’ve been trying not to give in to it, the urge to let myself go and fall apart, because I feel like once it starts it’s never going to stop.

Some say the women left something of themselves in the water; some say it retains some of their power, for ever since then it has drawn to its shores the unlucky, the desperate, the unhappy, the lost. They come here to swim with their sisters.

the horrors conjured up by the mind are always so much worse than what is.

I can’t even listen to music because I feel everything has this other meaning that I didn’t see before and it hurts too fucking much to face it now.

But then I suppose I’ve never really lost anyone. How would I know what that kind of grief feels like?

but really what did she know about the truth? They were all just telling stories.

Perhaps having children makes you forget being one.