Varina

by Charles Frazier

Let go, son. It will be all right. Take one deep breath and then just rise from this bad place and from your broken body and keep going. I’ll sit here with you and hold your hand until you’ve made it past the bend in the road and into the green woods.

You’ll find that as you grow old, you stop bothering to hide the self you’ve been all along.

He wonders how it is possible to love someone and still want to throw down every remnant of the order they lived by.