When the Stars Go Dark

by Paula McLain

If you think about it, most of us have very little choice about what we’re going to become or who we’re going to love, or what place on earth chooses us, becoming home. All we can do is go when we’re called, and pray we’ll still be taken in.

Home

The gloaming, Eden always called this time of day, a strange term that meant “to glow,” even as it referred to the dark.

Glooming

I think of the girl’s family, losing their minds with worry and dread. I think of how lonely and lost Cameron might have felt for years, desperate even—disconnected. How sadness and shame are more than feelings; they’re an illness, a terrible cancer that spins through the world taking lives in a hidden cyclical way that might never end.

Sadness And Shame

To her, the idea that we reincarnated was an obvious extension of the cycle of life. All life. Everything spun on a constantly moving wheel of birth, growth, and decay, the ocean around us and the Milky Way above, and all the galaxies beyond ours, numberless as the ferns unfurling along the side of the road. God wasn’t up there, in some celestial kingdom, but here in the world, in dirt clods and dew, in the patience of the spider that lived behind the sugar jar, in the exquisite strands of her web. Death wasn’t the end any more than a single shuddering wave on Portuguese Beach could stop moving. She’d made her peace with it, but I was still struggling.

Life Death

Mothers and fathers are supposed to stay. That’s the original human story, in every culture, since the beginning of time. Mine hadn’t, and neither had Cameron’s.

Mothers and Fathets

“What’s so funny?” Will wants to know. “Your face,” Wanda says with a wink, and just like that I love her. The world needs an army of Wandas—strong, sarcastic, unafraid women who say what they think and act straightforwardly, without apology or permission. Women who roar instead of flinch.

Friend

“Because everyone wants to be looked for, whether they realize it or not.”

Looked For

“No, I don’t mean fate, Anna. I mean character. We do what we do because we are who we are.”

Who we are

I’d done something terrible and on purpose and I couldn’t take it back just because I felt sorry. Sorry wouldn’t find her. Sorry was maybe the loneliest feeling of all, I understood, because it only brought you back to yourself.

Sorry

“We’re all just energy, you know, me, you, this table, this town. All moving at certain frequencies. When we pass from this life, our essence keeps going, keeps moving.”

Energy

“There are things that change us fundamentally on this side, too, like loss and trauma. Just think about it. We know trauma changes the brain. Why wouldn’t it affect our energy?

Trauma

“You know, we don’t always understand what we’re living inside of, or how it will matter. We can guess all we want and prepare, too, but we never know how it’s going to turn out.” I

Vguess

Getting your heart broken is the privilege of being human,

Heart

“Not so different than bottle-feeding a baby,” Tally says. There’s a long, quiet space, then she says, “I was thinking about forgiveness today. You know, so many people get confused about what it is, binding it up with guilt. Feeling ashamed about things they never had any control over in the first place. I don’t believe forgiveness is something we have to kill ourselves trying to earn. It’s already here, all around us, like rain. We just have to let it in.”

Forgiveness