Things You Save in a Fire

by Katherine Center

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

together. I wondered if she would.

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

and choosing to love anyway … That’s ...

T...

cour...

“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.” Done, I thought. “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.” I

Yes, the world is full of unspeakable cruelty. But the answer wasn’t to never feel hope, or bliss, or love—but to savor every fleeting, precious second of those feelings when they came.

The answer wasn’t to never love anyone. It was to love like crazy whenever you could. So I

do it because I believe that human connection is the only thing that will save us. I do it because I believe we learn empathy when we listen to other people’s stories and feel their pain with them. I do it because I know for certain that our world has an empathy problem with women, and this is one brave thing I can do to help fix it.