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He’s linear and infers rules from onetime behaviors, which drives me crazy.
I couldn’t remember a time when he’d sat and listened to me. Even back then, our conversations were only ever about him and his insecurities.
Trojan horse yourself into a man, and people would give a shit about you.
My voice only came alive when I was talking about someone else; my ability to see the truth and to extrapolate human emotion based on what I saw and was told didn’t extend to myself.
Both for her, to endure innocence and maturity in the same body, and for him, to watch the innocence vanish in drips until it was gone.
don’t know. Are you supposed to want to get married? Or are you just supposed to marry the person you’re into when you decide it’s time to get married?”
slowly, then all at once.”
“Why didn’t you stop her from dying?” Solly asked. “It’s not always up to me.”
“One day, and I hope it’s very soon for your sake, and especially for the children’s sake, you’ll have a revelation about how angry you are. Once you stop being so angry, your world will get better. Your problems will be solved.”
“It seems so clear to me,” she’d said, “that the ocean would rather you didn’t surf on it. If it wanted you, it would give you a more sustained wave.”
AGAIN I’LL SAY IT: Life is a process in which you collect people and prune them when they stop working for you. The only exception to that rule is the friends you make in college.
A wife isn’t like an ultra-girlfriend or a permanent girlfriend. She’s an entirely new thing. She’s something you made together, with you as an ingredient. She couldn’t be the wife without you. So hating her or turning on her or talking to your friends about the troubles you have with her would be like hating your own finger. It’s like hating your own finger even after it becomes necrotic. You don’t separate yourself from it. You look at your wife and you’re not really looking at someone you hate. You’re looking at someone and seeing your own disabilities and your own disfigurement. You’re
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asleep. Look what a friendship could still be after all these years. It was a miracle, the pain that could be survived. It was a miracle what two people could move on from. It was a miracle what two people can see each other go through and still have love for each other.
I thought about what it might feel like to feel like me again.
God, I wanted to say, how are you supposed to live like this, knowing you used to answer to no one? How is this the arc we set for ourselves as a successful life? But he’d never understand that. He had the life he wanted. So did I. And yet. And yet and yet and yet and yet and yet.
You were only at risk for not remembering that this was as good as it would get, in every single moment—that you are right now as young as you’ll ever be again. And now. And now. And now and now and now.
What was so much better than stability and the love of a good person who rooted for you? We fall in love and we decide to marry in this one incredible moment, and what if everything that happens after that is about trying to remember that moment? We watch ourselves and our spouses change, and the work is to constantly recall the reasons you did this in the first place. Why is that honorable, to live in service of a moment you have to constantly work so hard to remember?
All those things can drive you crazy if you’re a smart person. If you are a smart woman, you cannot stand by and remain sane once you fully understand, as a smart person does, the constraints of this world on a woman. I couldn’t bear it. I saw it too clearly and so I retreated from it. Rachel, she endured. She tried. And she got the punishment.
which is all the sides of the story, even the ones that hurt to look at directly—even the ones that made us too angry to want to hear them.
