Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

You don’t realize how much you’ll miss the asphyxiating intimacy of early parenthood until you can finally breathe again.

Find your own thing. Don’t just do what everyone expects you to do. Remember: You have the right to become whoever you want to be. Don’t worry about what other people might think…because you will be exceptional, Olive. But you have to be willing to try.”

“Do you like things the way they are? Because if you do, by all means, carry on. But if you don’t, nothing’s going to change until you decide to make it change.”

Only someone fearful of his own ordinariness would buy, so unquestioningly, someone else’s extraordinariness.

Who you want people to be makes you blind to who they really are.

After Billie died, I spent a long time idealizing her. That’s what you do when someone’s gone. You remember only the best parts of them. You reassemble your memories to forget all their flaws, all the fights you had, the things about them that you really kind of hated. It makes your grief feel more powerful to forget how human they were and how human you were with them. Maybe it even assuages your guilt to forget all the dysfunctional parts of your relationship and all the pointless, petty grievances you held against them.

It didn’t seem fair: that you could have love, and then that love could fizzle, curdle, ossify into something less wonderful than what it once was. And then you were stuck, because ultimately, love is a kind of trap. Once you find it, you can’t deviate from that commitment without

everyone getting hurt. You can’t just leave. Instead, need wins out over freedom; and everyone stands around feeling wounded and bitter, letting inertia take over.