The Last House Guest

by Megan Miranda

I’ve known enough of loss to accept that grief may lose its sharpness with time, but memory only tightens. Moments replay.

“All you really need to know is that my dad is the brains of the operation, and my mom is the brawn.”

the idea that you didn’t have to apologize. Not for what you’d done and not for who you were.

that grief did not create anything that had not existed before. It only heightened what was already there.

Obsession was the gravity that kept you in orbit, a force you were continually spiraling toward, even when you were looking away.

How you can hurtle through darkness by momentum alone, without a single conscious thought, with no one to see you go.

But that was the thing about loving someone—it only counted when you knew their flaws and did it anyway.

“Incomplete infinity,” I told him. Because there was nothing that lasted forever.

The secret to success that eluded even Parker, he said, was that you had to take great risks for great rewards. That to change your life, to truly change it, you had to be willing to lose.

The shocking power of the ocean. A reminder that one place could become both a nightmare and a dream.

but I knew how it could be—how you could become so lost in your own anger and grief and bitterness that you can barely see anything else.