Notes on an Execution

by Danya Kukafka

This was how it always went, wasn’t it? All those women who’d come before her, in caves and tents and covered wagons. It was a wonder how she’d never given much thought to the ancient, timeless fact. Motherhood was, by nature, a thing you did alone.

No one is all bad. No one is all good. We live as equals in the murky gray between.

You’ll know it when you feel it, her mother said then. The right kind of love will eat you alive.

There is no such thing as good or evil. Instead, we have memory and choice, and we all live at various points on the spectrum between. We are created by what has happened to us, combined with who we choose to be.

shorn

morose

She had known from a young age that everyone had darkness inside—some just controlled it better than others. Very few people believed that they were bad, and this was the scariest part. Human nature could be so hideous, but it persisted in this ugliness by insisting it was good.

The right kind of love will eat you alive.

Grief was a hole. A portal to nothing.

You don’t need to have it all. You only need to figure out how much is enough.

Of love itself. Death is cruel, and infinite, and inevitable, but it is not the end.

There is good and there is evil, and the contradiction lives in everyone. The good is simply the stuff worth remembering. The good is the point of it all.