Heaven Adjacent

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

You can put any kind of judgment you

want on the way you feel, but that won’t make it go away. Unfortunately you can’t insult your feelings out of existence. Trust me. People try all the time. If it worked, we’d know about it by now.”

There’s a reason people will always let you down. It’s because they came to this weird planet to live their own lives. Not anybody else’s. Classic case of needs in conflict. You get what I’m saying?”

People come into our lives, she thought, and it’s not always a forever kind of thing, and not always meant to be. Not every deal is for keeps.

“I’m starting to see that we make choices at an early age,” Roseanna continued, “when we’re too young to know what will make us happy. But they’re more or less permanent choices. They don’t have to be, I guess. But somehow we end up thinking they have to be. It’s hard to make a change after so many years, and we don’t want to let people down by breaking our promises.

We blame them for the fact that we’re not happy. Because that’s easier than blaming ourselves. Because if we blame ourselves, then we have to fix it, and that’s a tricky thing.”

“We’re all going to die,” Nelson said, leaning forward over his knees and staring down the end of his fishing pole. “So it doesn’t pay to go through life fearing death. Mind you, I realize as I say so . . . it’s one of those things that says easy and does hard.”

But we waste our precious time. Why? Why do we live like we’re not going to die?”