The Magic of Found Objects

by Maddie Dawson

I’m mostly content to come home, strip off my glamorous work clothes, scrub off my mascara, put on leggings, and sit down at the kitchen table and make myself work on the novel that I’ve been writing off and on for five years now. The novel that makes me feel I’m more than simply The Person Who Attends Other People’s Weddings and Then Goes Home to Listen to Her Eggs Drying Up.

He’s smiling at me. “I don’t think,” he says, “that I want to live in a world in which this isn’t the kind of love that really matters.”

and we are looking around at Brooklyn the way Manhattanites always look at Brooklyn: like we’ve landed where dreams go to die.

Sarah appears just then, and she has the look of a vampire who has been without blood for too long a time.

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.

“Just take your place in the world with as much grace and gratitude as you can muster and try to see the best in us.”

People were incompetent and clueless, but I was, too—and we were all just doing our best.

She didn’t know, for instance, how wet and cold it really was, and so when she came outside this morning, the first thing she did was to throw herself down in the middle of it and roll around. “And—well, I learned my lesson real fast!” she says. “That shit is frozen water!”

when you’re drawn to someone, they also feel the same way about you because it’s the spark in you talking to the spark in them.

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