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(There are many ways to be crippled, I’ve learned over the years, many forms of paralysis.)
Something inexorable seeds itself in the place of your origin. You can never escape the bonds of family history, no matter how far you travel.
OVER THE YEARS, certain stories in the history of a family take hold.
Sometimes the least believable stories are the true ones.
There are many ways to love and be loved.
‘Close to the body of things, there can be heard the stir that makes us and destroys us.’
“It’s all right if you don’t exactly understand,” Mrs. Crowley told the class. “What matters is how a poem resonates for you.”
What must it have been like to capture these thoughts on paper? Like trapping fireflies, I think.
The words seem at odds with Mother’s personality, her negligible ambitions, her lack of interest in anything beyond the point.
But as I watch her pine casket descend slowly into the dirt, I try to envision the reunion of a frail eighty-year-old woman with her decades-younger husband and their three sons and am left with the lingering feeling that the places we go in our minds to find comfort have little to do with where our bodies go.
“Some things take the time they take.
“It’s strange, don’t you think—to name your child after a living person you’ve chosen never to see again?”
I know what it is to carry mixed feelings in the marrow of your bones.
It’s a peculiar kind of dissatisfaction, a bittersweet nostalgia for a moment not yet past.
I know how the death of a parent can be both a release and a reckoning.
They don’t have to fret about a cure we didn’t seek. This disease—whatever it is—will advance as it will. I think about the destructiveness of desire: of wanting something unrealistic, of believing in the possibility of rescue.
It’s painful to hold out hope for the things that once brought you joy. You have to find ways to make yourself forget.
We hunker down in the fall and winter, slow our heartbeats to a hibernating rhythm, struggle to rouse ourselves in March.
This life of ours can feel an awful lot like waiting.
Though I lived with this man for my entire life, I never really knew him. He was like a frozen bay himself, I think—an icy crust, layers deep, above roiling water.
The older I get, the more I believe that the greatest kindness is acceptance.
What I mean is I think you’re used to being observed but not really . . . seen.
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?
No one will ever know, when we’re gone to dust, the life we’ve shared here, our desires and our doubts, our intimacy and our solitude.
those who fear the darkness in themselves are the most likely to see it in other people.
