Matchmaking for Beginners

by Maddie Dawson

life can’t be fascinating all the time.” “Oh, honey. Mine is. If it gets boring for longer than two weeks, I make adjustments.” I smile right into her eyes. “And it’s paid off because now I live with Houndy, who is a lobsterman, and the thing about him is that he could talk to me for four days straight without stopping about lobsters and their shells and the different tides and the sky, and nothing he ever said would bore me because the language that Houndy is really speaking in is all about love and life and death and appreciation and gratitude and funny moments.”

You need to forget what society has told you about life and expectations, and don’t let anybody make you pretend. You are enough, just the way you are—do you hear me?

The world needs your miracles.” “I don’t know how to perform miracles,” I tell her. “Well, then you better start practicing. Words are a good first step. They have a lot of power. You can summon things by believing in them. First you visualize them being true, and then they come true. You’ll see.” She kisses me on both cheeks and then she heads through the door, but when she gets there she turns around and says, “Oh, I meant to tell you. You need a mantra to help you. You can borrow mine, if you want: ‘Whatever happens, love that.’”

I’ve made nice with trouble my whole life, and I’ve noticed that what happens is that problems just curl right up like declawed kittens and nestle at your feet and fall asleep. Later, you look down, and they’ve wandered off somewhere. You bid them a fond farewell and get back to what you wanted to do in the first place.

So I am going to die. Most natural thing in the world to have happen. Life ends.

If we all lived forever, I tell him, then life really wouldn’t have any meaning. So why not embrace it, prepare for it, love what is?

I think that we all do need to have our hearts broken at some point, and so maybe I actually did him a good service. It’s something we need to know about ourselves, how the heart breaks and grows back.

I might be a star. I used to think we became stars when we died. From stardust to stardust, someone told me.

we are all vibrational beings in physical bodies, and thoughts actually become reality so you have to make sure you’re thinking about what you want and not about what you don’t want.

“You know, when you watch people like that live, you start to realize that the rest of us are just counting off the days until we die. They were the experts at life.”

“I am not afraid of death, and I am not afraid of life. These days are full of passion and love and richness, now that I know the end is coming. I carry the ocean in my blood. I float out into the night, knowing that when the time comes, I will leave on the luminous huge milky moon. I am disappearing by degrees, yet I want to stay longer, look back at my whole glorious life. Where did you go?”

it’s in the broken places where the light gets in.