Hate List

by Jennifer Brown

The truth was most days I couldn’t feel grateful no matter how hard I tried. Most days I couldn’t even pinpoint how I felt. Sometimes sad, sometimes relieved, sometimes confused, sometimes misunderstood. And a lot of times angry.

“Life isn’t fair. A fair’s a place where you eat corn dogs and ride the Ferris wheel.”

“One’s my favorite number,” Bea giggled. “The word won being the past tense of win, and we can all say at the end of the day that we’ve won once again, can’t we? Some days making it to the end of the day is quite the victory.”

“Time’s never up,” she whispered, not looking at me, but at my canvas. “Just like there’s always time for pain, there’s always time for healing. Of course there is.”

You had a good life here. You may not have pulled the trigger, but you helped cause the tragedy.”

I knew what she was thinking: Being pretty isn’t everything, but sometimes being ugly is.

She handed the books to me and I leaned over to take them. They felt heavy in my palms. I liked the feeling of it. For once the future seemed heavier than the past.

Beneath the struggle there would always be that basic love, that safe place to come home to.

We all got to be winners sometimes. But what he didn’t understand was that we all had to be losers, too. Because you can’t have one without the other.