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At nineteen, Mackenzie was too young to know the terminology of the unhappily aging.
But when you’re really hoping for something, and when that hope takes up so much space inside your rib cage that it’s hard to eat or breathe in, you have to dismiss the things that make sense to make room for it. It’s a survival thing.
Too bad how the end of something could ruin the beginning and middle of it.
“Social media influencers,” she said to Maude, “are privileged, vapid, beautiful people who make a living dispensing common sense on social media like it’s groundbreaking wisdom. And it’s a social disease”—now she looked at Mackenzie—“because it pumps up the ego of the influencer while tricking the influencees into thinking it’s for them.
“Does it bother you, drinking coffee right next to a crematorium?” Sunna replied, fighting tears again. “It bothers me so much.”
people often gave or expressed love in the way they’d like it given or expressed to themselves.
Sunna saw them looking and whispering, and she enjoyed it. She never minded having people talk about her.
Wisdom said this behavior was unhealthy, but did wisdom actually stop anyone from doing anything? No. People stopped doing stuff when they wanted to.
If you were okay, you thought about your actions, and you only followed through on the right ones.
Who ever felt only one way about something?
No one tells a kitten what to do.
“I’d sooner take up a belief in ghosts than believe Maude has friends.”
The ghosts. The skin on his arms bubbled up. Would she think he was crazy if he told her it was ghosts? Probably. He didn’t want that. Was he brave enough to go up there, after having been expressly forbidden in his aunt’s will? Nope.
Was it just a high school rite of passage to be so utterly infatuated with someone who didn’t care about you at all? Even more humiliating: Was she just the replacement sister?
She’d made the decision to keep quiet when she was thirteen, and maybe Sunna was right that no one would hold that against her, but she’d doubled down on that decision when she was fourteen, and fifteen, and sixteen, and seventeen, and eighteen, and nineteen. At some point in there, she was certain, she had forfeited her right to mercy.
She was free and sad and excited and weightless and so, so, so unbearably heavy.
I know I shouldn’t, but seeing him again made me wish that I could just forgive him and give him another chance.”
if we all have baggage, then baggage isn’t a good reason not to love someone.”
hugging Maude wouldn’t be the worst thing. And if Maude hugged back, it would be sincere. No doubt about that.
“That’s true,” she said. “I don’t think I did the right thing. But what would have been right? Is there a right thing?”
If you don’t give a second chance, you don’t get one either. Right?”
“I think that’s part of being an adult, you know? Your life is just frayed at the edges, and you have whole haunted cities full of people who owe you explanations and apologies. Cities full of ghosts. The end.”
I let her be my ghost. I conjured her spirit up and let it haunt me all this time. But my obsessing over her like that never made her real, didn’t impact her reality at all. She’s off living the dream, maybe thinking about me, probably not, while I’m stuck living this haunted life, miserable.
The ghost isn’t the person; it’s the feelings attached to the person.
So it wasn’t a perfect metaphor, but it was good enough for Sunna. For the first time in years, she felt decidedly unhaunted.
“Just one of those moments, you know, where you have no new information, but your brain rearranges all of what you do have and it suddenly makes sense.”
That just because someone leaves you, that doesn’t mean that you are not still perfectly fine and valuable, and it definitely doesn’t mean you should leave yourself.
The whole point of this day is that we’re all here just watching someone ‘arrive.’ Marriage is, like, a conclusion. And I guess it just makes me think about all my loose ends . . .”
Own it.
