Unmissing

by Minka Kent

My grandmother once said life is what happens between the curveballs and happy accidents.

Someone once told me that I’d only be my husband’s favorite until we had our first child, and that I’d only be my daughter’s favorite until she becomes a teenager and decides she hates everything about me. But I don’t think it has to be that way. I intend to be everyone’s favorite until my dying breath.

The future isn’t carved in stone—it isn’t even written in pencil on the back of a napkin.

I was a lab rat to him. An experiment in how much a human could take without breaking.

There was a sick curiosity inside him amplified by an inability to feel. People like that do their bidding in the dark, behind closed doors, to living souls incapable of fighting back.

There are millionaires out there who’ve fattened their bank accounts and secured their futures all because they figured out how to get paid for telling people what they want to hear.

This house of cards is one gust of wind from toppling over, and I don’t want to be that gust.

Never give a horse too much rein lest he think he’s the one leading the excursion.

I was simply missing, and now I’m unmissing.