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Do other people walk around in this state? Did my parents? What a strange idea—that perfectly ordinary people with mundane lives might have once experienced this quickening, this vertiginous unfolding. Their eyes betray no evidence of it.
“Who knows what motivates anyone, right? Humans are mysterious creatures.”
How quickly, with a slight twist in perception, do people’s strengths become flaws!)
Their sympathy fills me with a shame so deep that I can understand why someone might sail off to a distant land, never to return to where he’s from.
I know how the death of a parent can be both a release and a reckoning.
An elderly woman with a face like a cellar apple
I think about the destructiveness of desire: of wanting something unrealistic,
It’s painful to hold out hope for the things that once brought you joy. You have to find ways to make yourself forget.
I wonder, not for the first time, if shame and pride are merely two sides of the same coin.
This life of ours can feel an awful lot like waiting.
Do our natures dictate the choices we make, I wonder, or do we choose to live a certain way because of circumstances beyond our control? Perhaps these questions are impossible to tease apart because, like a tangle of seaweed on a rock, they are connected at the root.
The older I get, the more I believe that the greatest kindness is acceptance.
Rapunzel letting down her hair, Cinderella sliding her foot into the glass slipper, Sleeping Beauty awaiting a kiss. All were given one chance to step into a happily ever after—or at least it must’ve seemed that way. But was it the prince who attracted them, or merely the opportunity for escape?
Will he be a different person in his own home?
