The Magic of Found Objects

by Maddie Dawson

I came into the world as both a surprise and a complication, which tells you everything you need to know about how things have gone ever since.

we were left with magic flickering in our DNA and practicality knitted into our bones.

But this. Overturned baby bottles. Spilled milk. It’s the smell of we’re-in-over-our-heads and why-didn’t-anyone-warn-us, of tears and sleeplessness. There are whiffs of recrimination and regret.

You’re creating your reality, and the words you tell yourself, the story you believe about yourself, is the way things are going to turn out for you. You have to fill your heart with love for yourself, Phronsie. That is the first and most important thing you have to do. Everything you want will follow from that.”

grief is something you can get used to. You shrink it down, put it in your pocket, like a phone number scrawled on a piece of paper, and maybe after a while, you just leave it in your drawer and don’t carry it with you at all.

It takes character to live with the imperfect facts of your life and to change the things you can change, and to be willing to live with the things you can’t do anything about.

when I look more closely, I can see that the slash of red lipstick didn’t quite make it onto her lips the way all of us might have hoped.

my father had a saying that fits right in here: “I’ve enjoyed about as much of this as I can stand.”

“Everything always works out in the end. And if it didn’t work out yet, then it isn’t the end.”