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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“The sleep of a very happy man.”
Not every moment can be precious.” “Oh, mija. Even the shittiest ones are. One day you’ll look back and mourn the pain of it, how alive you were.”
Being held in the hearts of our loved ones.
“Plans are just silly attempts to control the tricks of time.”
“Everyone knows you go home.”
She pictured them all then, tiny black dots blending into a thick-lined border.
It seemed useless to pray. Who protects the invisible?
how to handle immigrant child’s unaccompanied arrival.
Until he was gone, she had never known it was possible to feel too young and like she had aged a lifetime all at once.
And I didn’t realize family required warning.”
In that quick pause, she tried on his last name with her first.
She wanted to believe that if she looked into his eyes, she would find every bit of the hope she had lost still alive within him.
People placed too much trust in things working out the way they should, and never enough on the chance that the most meaningless conditions could change everything.
He was more confident now, and somehow, less innocent.
“Mija, when you’ve been friends as long as we have, you keep each other young.”
there was nothing more haunting than a what if.
since her biggest triumphs often stemmed from her deepest regrets.
Puta! Is this how you repay your family? By forgetting
The hardest thing was not the goodbye, but the silence that followed. It left Elda feeling disoriented, like she had been plucked from one place and left alone in another.
What a fragile thing it was, to feel connected.
Memory made their love feel like an open, boundless thing, and he wondered if this were true or just a trick of life’s contrasts—a room darkened by a flash of too much light.
His absence would no longer be a question she had to answer.
Patience is a process that births forgiveness.
Sometimes they would say nothing at all, because the border had left nothing behind but silence.
Grief is never really gone; it is just a darkness you eventually adjust to.
If she could understand this aching hesitation that made love burn and run scared in circles, because the only place that could cradle all her hurt was the same place that was causing it.
It made her feel like she might drift to somewhere peaceful, but like always, her sorrow sank, and then buoyed her with each breath.
