Things You Save in a Fire

by Katherine Center

“And don’t talk too much, either. Remember: What women think of as sharing, men see as complaining.”

That’s how life is. Things happen. Lives get broken. Some people never can put themselves back together.

Of course, our parents get an extra dose of importance in our minds. When we’re little, they’re everything—the gods and goddesses that rule our worlds. It takes a lot of growing up, and a lot of disappointment, to accept that they’re just normal, bumbling, mistaken humans, like everybody else.

“Choosing to love—despite all the ways that people let you down, and disappear, and break your heart. Knowing everything we know about how hard life is and choosing to love anyway … That’s not weakness. That’s courage.”

“Just look around at the world—at the lonely and the cheated on. The violent. The abandoned. I know exactly what people do to each other. I’ve seen enough ruined lives to last forever.”

“that you clearly, obviously, any second now, are just about to fall in love.”

It left me thinking a lot about how much what you think you’re going to think matters.

That’s the only way to survive. You take in too much. One horror after another soaks through your skin, swirls in your lungs, echoes in your ears. You can’t think too hard about what it means, or how anybody feels, least of all you. You can’t help them if you become them—and the only reason you’re there is to help.

“Forgiveness is about a mind-set of letting go.” She thought for a second, then said, “It’s about acknowledging to yourself that someone hurt you, and accepting that.”

“Then it’s about accepting that the person who hurt you is flawed, like all people are, and letting that guide you to a better, more nuanced understanding of what happened. Flawed, I thought. Okay. Check. “And then there’s a third part,” she went on, “probably the hardest, that involves trying to look at the aftermath of what happened and find ways that you benefited, not just ways you were harmed.”