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Watching my grandfather work taught me that not everything was fluid. There were certain things that you hit from different angles, but you never gave up on. You did the work that was needed, wherever that work took you.
Maybe we are all fools, one way or another, when it comes to seeing the totality of the people who love us—the people we try to love.
My problems came when I tried to fit myself into someone else’s life, especially when that meant giving up a part of myself in the process.
He never understood that I wasn’t scared of someone leaving me. I was scared that the wrong person would stay.
This is the terrible thing about a tragedy. It isn’t with you every minute. You forget it, and then you remember it again. And you see it with a stark quality: This is what is required of you now, just to get along.
“My grandfather used to say that most people don’t want to hear the thing that will make it work better,” I said. “They want to hear what will make it easier.”
“Einstein said, So far as the theories of mathematics are about reality, they are not certain; so far as they are certain, they are not about reality.”
How do you explain it when you find in someone what you’ve been waiting for your whole life? Do you call it fate? It feels lazy to call it fate. It’s more like finding your way home—where home is a place you secretly hoped for, a place you imagined, but where you’d never before been. Home. When you weren’t sure you’d ever get to have one.
This is the thing about good and evil. They aren’t so far apart—and they often start from the same valiant place of wanting something to be different.
In one way or another, this is the deal we all sign when we love someone. For better or worse. It’s the deal we have to sign again and again to keep that love. We don’t turn away from the parts of someone we don’t want to see. However quickly or long it takes to see them. We accept them if we are strong enough. Or we accept them enough to not let the bad parts become the entire story.
It’s never about someone else the moment you realize it is up to you to get yourself to a better place. It’s only about figuring out how to get there.
