Surviving Savannah

by Patti Callahan Henry

I needed the evil to become good. I needed the dark to become light. I needed the stories to end in triumph or what was the point?

I wanted—no, I needed—the stories to make sense, for the world to be restored at the end.

she was tired of feeling things, even the goodness of a story.

Because the only thing better than avoiding my own life at the present moment was completely involving myself in the lives of those who came before me.

The idea that surviving brings everyone to a new and better place is a lie told by people who need the world to make sense.”

in the end, and in the middle and beginning, we are alone. The love that comes and goes in our lives is just a momentary reprieve.

Family had always possessed a gravitational force field, part love, part obligation, mixed with the usual petty irritations and the bonds of an intimately shared history.

Who doesn’t want to believe a promise?”

Maybe, Everly Winthrop, we are the ones who make meaning out of the tragedies.”

Tragedy—it can come from anywhere at any time. How do we go through life knowing that? How did we ever not know it? And yet we pretend we’re safe. It’s absurd.”

We can’t unknow the sudden thrust of misfortune that comes out of nowhere. Once it happens, it is...

We were, all of us, hidden in different ways, under different waves. The broken parts, the remnants of our own explosions, kept secret from others.

Those bits and pieces of myself, of everyone, could be retrieved and examined; their stories could be told. If I took the time, if I looked closely enough, if I dove deep enough, I could find my own wreckage and honor it.

Nothing is certain and the constant trying to make things certain only causes more heartache.”

What can anyone give you greater than now, starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

My belief in the unbroken world was gone, but oddly that revelation made everything more sacred.

I washed ashore to the solid ground of his kiss, a home I’d wanted to find. His touch carried me to the bottom of the sea, to the moment when truth had rushed in, and I’d known that all of life is worth living; his touch resurrected love and hope and raised me back up to the sparkling sunlight.