Leaving Time

by Jodi Picoult

When someone leaves you once, you expect it to happen again. Eventually you stop getting close enough to people to let them become important to you, because then you don’t notice when they drop out of your world.

Don’t do any intentional harm to yourself or anyone else, and get happy.

There are an endless number of people who have left a love-shaped hole in the heart of someone else. Eventually someone brave and stupid will come along and try to fill that hole. But it never works, and so instead, that selfless soul winds up with a gap in his heart, too. And so on. It’s a miracle that anyone survives, when so much of us is missing.

Just because you leave someone doesn’t mean you ever let them go. Even when you couldn’t see me, you knew deep down I was still there. And even when I can’t see you,” I say, my voice breaking, “I’ll know that, too.”

If you think about someone you’ve loved and lost, you are already with them. The rest is just details.

There is a reason people say being a mother is the hardest job in the world: You do not sleep and you do not get vacation time. You do not leave your work on your desk at the end of the day. Your briefcase is your heart, and you are rifling through it constantly. Your office is as wide as the world, and your punch card is measured not in hours but in a lifetime.