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women, we’re used to making ourselves useful.” “You don’t need to. You’re delightful doing nothing.”
How unmoored they all were, how helpless, how courageous.
“Maybe that’s all growing up is. Knowing in real time that you don’t know anything.”
My background was tough in most ways. I was diminished by it. And strengthened by it. I don’t think you get to have one without the other.”
“There’s nothing more dangerous than thinking you’re a victim.”
“Maybe happiness is overrated,” Evan said. “Freedom, too. Maybe the only way to get anywhere worth being is to pick up the heaviest thing you can carry. And carry it.”
Maybe that’s what intimacy was, a discomfort like the burning he’d felt in his chest when Joey had told him she could take care of herself. A sense of dread at what could go wrong, a stifling of fear, a baring of the vulnerable self to the judgment of someone else. The jagged edge of one soul meeting another, tearing and rending, a connection and a diminishment both. All that imperfection, all that friction—it wore down the tread, expending rather than preserving. What if that was the point? To expend ourselves in the care of people who mattered? Without that, what was there to preserve?
Once you’re real, it’s scarier.
Do not hide unwanted things in the fog.
“No one’s enough as a parent.”
time stretching out ahead, full of loss and opportunity. Every step left behind a world of options but set you on new ground.
“He seemed simultaneously attracted to and terrified of me.” “That’s a good description of how most guys feel around an impressive young woman.”
“Hell, D.C. needs all the help they can get,” Tommy said. “Half of those oxygen thieves are peacenik bliss-ninnies, and the other half’s busy moonlighting as Putin’s cockholster.”
How much courage it took to care for someone.
One thing he’d learned time and again was that you never could tell what kind of private hell people were fighting through.
“You were cursed with being pretty, which means the world told you what you were supposed to be before you could figure it out for yourself,” he said. “But what if who you could be is something vastly more important and powerful? Some men are afraid of that. Especially in an attractive young woman. Do you want to let them write your story?”
you’re still the same person you’ve always been.” “No.” “We all are,” she said. “We don’t leave anything behind, don’t you understand?”
That’s what people did for you, they held you to a standard you had to live up to.
DON’T PICK A FIGHT WITH REALITY,
It struck him that the same law of physics applied to any injury, physical or emotional. If you babied it, it stiffened even more, spreading the pain through you. But if you yielded, if you were willing to endure the white-hot agony of making vulnerable what you sought to protect, you had a shot at releasing it.
He could see her extraordinariness only when he considered the fullness of who she was, not just the shape of who he wanted her to be.
We all have the story we tell,
the energy she conveyed with every movement, an unspoken vibe that said she was the fullest version of herself, that she was possessed with all the composure and murderous skill the world had to offer, and that her presence before you was a privilege. That she was sparing you from her terrible, terrible powers, and if you could countenance her company with grace, she might add a drop of her potency to yours.
you took your own insecurity and put it on her. That weakens her. And it weakens you. You treat a young woman like that with respect. If nothing else it’ll teach you about yourself, teach you who you want to be whenever you’re ready to be that person.
“Dogs are feedback loops for positive emotion,” Evan said. “They’re happy to see you, which makes you happy. Then you pet them and they’re even happier, which makes you even happier. They…” She cocked her head. “What?” “Nothing. It’s stupid.” She banged a bony elbow into his sore ribs, and he tried to act like it didn’t hurt. “C’mon, X. Spill the tea.”
He cleared his throat. “They teach you the love you deserve.”
Responsibility’s where you find meaning
