The Office of Historical Corrections

by Danielle Evans

you take nothing for granted when the price of it is etched across the face of the person you love the most, when you are born into a series of loans and know you will never be up to the cost of the debt.

I didn’t—and still don’t—dare compare the terms of my life to my mother’s, the stakes of my choices to hers, but I understand more now about how it feels to love the excess in people, about how knowing someone else’s love will consume you doesn’t make it any less real or any less reciprocated, about how you can leave a person behind just to save the thing they value most—yourself.

what was this whole life she’d built if not already a way of telling anyone who’d ever doubted anything about her to fuck off?

just because he didn’t see something in her didn’t mean it wasn’t there,

my twenties, which I’d treated with a cast-down-your-bucket-where-you-are approach, had thus far only brought me a string of men who were all very sad about some quality in themselves that they had no intention of making any effort to change.

Things started quickly between us but then didn’t seem to know where to go.

Things were always salvageable between us, and knowing that felt like both a relief and an obligation.

“The beauty of motherhood is that all the choices are wrong,”