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I’m sucking down wine fast and writing myself an internal memo about how an athletic ability to find the positive—the sort that’s drilled into girls especially: be grateful, smile!—isn’t always a good thing.
Sometimes you should ask yourself why you’re having to.
The word “loss” had a new meaning, or its meaning became clear: a person who loved me, in a completely unique and irreplaceable way, had vanished and took with him our relationship.
It reminds me of that line about death just being another room. Lucas was dead to me and yet he’s in this room. It’s impossible.
Inside, Esther is fond of the sort of uplifting wall art that says things like LIVE LOVE LAUGH. It’s weird, because she’s the world’s least whimsical person. It always has a whiff of the floggings will continue until morale improves to me. I might get her one saying LAUGH DAMN YOU.
Everything feels temporary now. Because it always was, I just didn’t know it.
My bravado is a veneer. I’m as much a combination of outward bolshiness and inward terror of inadequacy as I was when I was an adolescent.
“Liking yourself is a radical act,” Clem had instructed Jo and myself. “Never more so than when you’ve had a crap time from a man.”
“It’s like aggressive hygge. Celebrate how great you are and what a nice time you have by yourself. Refuse to partake in the self-loathing we’re virtually commanded to, in this sick society.”
“Sometimes because the people we wanted to care for us, didn’t care for us, we live with a deliberate lack of care for ourselves. A way of getting back at them, through self-neglect.”
“Revenge, perhaps a buried desire to be rescued. And embracing a failure that you feel you’re marked for anyway.”
I learned after Dad died that rushing in with denials when someone says: “This is a pile of shit, and it hurts,” however well meant, can be stifling.
“Yearning and pining for more, or what the kids call FOMO, fear of missing out, is the curse of the modern age.”
Something I’ve learned is people do much worse things to you in the name of love, than they ever do as your enemy.”
Imagine. Imagine being a man, and thinking your approval has such value, that this sort of oily off-the-cuff compliment can stitch a wound this big.
I’ve learned a lesson: if someone can justify anything they want to do to themselves, they will do anything. What did Lucas say? People with no boundaries are dangerous people.
I want to get a First, not to be obnoxious, but to prove that there’s no shame in traveling the long way around to get where you want to go. It doesn’t matter if you take wrong turns. Arriving somewhere you want to be, in the end, is what counts.
“I wondered, Georgina, if you could imagine being in love with me again, the way I’m in love with you. And that given you’re the best thing to ever happen to me, if you could give me the chance to try to be the best thing that ever happened to you.”
I can feel our future in this kiss.
