Confessions on the 7:45

by Lisa Unger

She liked the shadows. That’s where you got to see all the things that other people missed.

But mainly, people were so wrapped up in their own inner hurricane that they never saw anything outside the storm of themselves.

People communicated in the little things. Most people didn’t even realize how the smallest details spoke volumes.

When the same thing happens again and again, we have to look at that. We have to unpack it and figure out why we cause ourselves and others pain.

Story is story, Stella said. It’s a portal you walk through into another world. And this world—which usually sucks—just disappears.

“Let me know if you want to talk about it,” Beth said easily. Translation: It’s okay if you don’t want to tell me what’s really going on. But I’m here.

And that’s all life was—a series of choices and their consequences.

“Even if you bring her back and get her into rehab,” said Jay, “she’ll be back out there within six months. They don’t get clean. Not from that.” That was a typical cop’s attitude. Bad stayed bad. But it wasn’t always true. “Everyone deserves a chance to straighten her life out,” said Andrew.

Everyone deserves a chance to straighten her life out. Some people never got it.

You really couldn’t fool your children, no matter how smart you thought you were.

Missed what she imagined might have been. But life didn’t work that way. You didn’t know what lay on the road not traveled.

There was no undoing the bad without losing the good. That was the trick of it all. The tangle of life. Just move forward, recalculate, recalibrate, find a new path.

“This is your home,” her mother said. “Wherever I am, that’s where you belong.” You were always a mother, she guessed. No matter how old your children were.

“Children may grow up. But they can always come home.”