Red at the Bone

by Jacqueline Woodson

Guess that’s where the tears came from, knowing that there’s so much in this great big world that you don’t have a single ounce of control over. Guess the sooner you learn that, the sooner you’ll have one less heartbreak in your life. Oh Lord. Some evenings I don’t know where the old pains end and the new ones begin. Feels like the older you get the more they run into one long, deep aching.

Because maybe this was what love felt like—a constant ache, an endless need.

Does it sound crazy to say I looked at her and saw the world falling into some kind of order that I didn’t even know it was out of?

He held the phone cupped between his shoulder and chin, pressing his ear into it. Wanting her closer, beside him. Even through the tears, though, he could hear the distance in her voice. Had it ever been anything other than this? He couldn’t remember.

Maybe this was love—wanting someone with all the senses.

She felt red at the bone—like there was something inside of her undone and bleeding.

What she was so afraid of saying was, I love you. I want to be with you. For nearly two years, she’d felt so much older than the other students at Oberlin. But with Jamison, she felt like a child suddenly. Wordless and floundering.

No one had taught me this—how to get out of bed and keep moving. And for the few days afterward, each time I tried to, I stumbled, dizziness coming for me like a wave. The smell of her still so much a part of me that it hurt to inhale. No one had taught me how to eat. How to swallow. So I lay there—day moving into night into day, while in the halls, I could hear students doing what they needed to do.