This Is How It Always Is

by Laurie Frankel

They had to fall in love for a week and then get their heart broken over the weekend and then fall in love again on Monday.

Canon event

“Puberty is one thing”—his voice was irritatingly reasonable—“but she shouldn’t have to hate her body.” “She’s going to be a woman,” said Rosie. “She should get used to it.”

He had always heard adults say something took your breath away because it was beautiful or surprising in a good way or precious like a baby. But this really did take his breath away, and it was the opposite. This was loss that ruined your life leading straight to gain that saved it. It wasn’t silver lining; it was a whole silver sky.

“Do you hate it here, my love?” “Here and everywhere,” Claude said without looking up.

And whereas the original three were little girls like he was, like he had been at any rate, at least half of the new kids were boys, and though once upon a time he’d been one of those too, it seemed like something his father had made up: long ago and far away and pretend. The little boys were scary because he didn’t know how to talk to them. And because what if they looked at him and realized he was one?

It was tiring to make stuff up. He had no idea all these years how hard his father was working when he wished he would just read them a book like everyone else’s dad.

This makes me think of Mary and her heart that gives and gives.

A wand is waved, some pixie dust is strewn, and presto—perfect princess. The transformation is immediate and complete, and no one looks back. It erases all the pain of her past, and it guarantees her happily ever after going forward.”

“I don’t want to erase your past. You were a perfect baby. You were the smartest three-year-old I ever knew. I don’t want to erase your transformation either. You’re so special, and you’re so brave. You proclaiming who you are and being who you want to be in a world that makes that hard is awe inspiring. I’m so proud of you, Poppy. I don’t want to pretend you’re ordinary. I want to climb your turret and shout your extraordinary to the entire city.”

You could sit down with another mom, even one halfway around the world whose life was very different from your own, and find easy conversation, shared spirit,

“All life. You are never finish, never done. Never become, always becoming. You know? Life is change so is always okay you are not there yet. Is like this for you and Poppy and everyone. The people who do not understand are change. The people who afraid are change. There is no before and no after because change is what is life. You live in change, in in between.”

Ordinary. Nothing special. A miracle.

They were teenage boys and therefore morons. She knew this in her heart.

You could not avoid being who you were, and sometimes it destroyed you.

and the fallible infallible fact that, no matter how fast and far and fleet you go, you cannot always outrun violence.

she could draw only thimblefuls of breath, shallow as dust, nothing as substantial as a whisper.

They could make hard decisions, together, when it was time to decide, and in the meantime, they could embrace what was now and what was good.

Their lives would be a different kind of fairy tale, less magic and more ambiguity, less once-upon-a-time and happily-ever-after and more in between.

Metamorphosis to ward off transmutation.

So instead I tried the opposite: write it down, carve it in stone. Or, if you like, paper’s just as permanent once you send it out into the world.

“Are you a boy or a girl?” said Aggie. “No.” Poppy made herself look up at her best friend in the entire universe. She thought of the fairy tale she’d told her students in Thailand, how much easier this would be if she had magic and a wand. “I’m not.”

“I’m all of the above.” Poppy couldn’t help smiling, which was kind of like magic because then Aggie couldn’t help smiling back. “And I’m also more to come.”

She felt that truly she could be perfectly content sitting at her kitchen table eating ice cream with her family and listening to this conversation go on forever.

These kids, her multitudes, they could grow up. They could move Away. They could—they would—become new, become changed, become actual adult people in progress, people she wouldn’t recognize, people she could not imagine. People remade. They would undergo miracles. They would transform. They would make magic.