Sundial

by Catriona Ward

These days I don’t understand why anyone bothers to watch soap operas or go to movies. I don’t even read or watch the news. Living is enough. It is so intense and painful.

I learned tactics early on. I pick my battles.

“You wanted this,” he said. “It’s all you wanted when we met. Now you’ve got it, all you can do is whine.” The mess of adult life, where you’ve both dug in so deep, where blame is a tapestry so tightly woven that it cannot ever be unpicked.

Kids understand so much. It can be terrifying, sometimes. “Well, it’s healthy for grown-ups to fight,” I say. “To get out what’s on the inside, so they can be friends again.”

Be where you are.

Books sink their hooks deep into your mind at that age.

Maybe they existed once and now they’re all gone. Maybe it’s a good thing they only live in our imagination now. But thoughts are free, as they say.

There are things that cannot be said in a marriage without changing it forever.

When people say something is “unthinkable,” what they usually mean is that they don’t want to think it. They are resistant to an idea. But that is not what unthinkable means. I understand that, now. It means to be confronted with a thought so vast, dark, and monstrous that it will not fit into any known shapes in your mind. It is poison and madness flowering behind your eyes.

Kill or cure, as they say.

And it’s a powerful thing, to keep a secret.

Not everything is meant to be forever.

Memory is a noose around the neck.

The sensation of being apart from your child is unique. It’s like being hollow.

“Often if you look underneath,” Miss Grainger said, “you find unexpected things.”

And I know from personal experience that when people get intense they sometimes do unwise things.

The past always has its hands around your neck, doesn’t it?”

“But it’s what we do that matters.

it made him sad, how much sadness there was in the world.

Pain and fear are like that, an explosion that sets the genes alight.

But we love them—or need them. Those two things can get mixed up.

You can only do three things with danger: run away from it, fight it, or make friends with it. I don’t know which one to do.

It’s possible to feel the horror of something and to accept it all at the same time. How else could we cope with being alive?

Closed doors lead to closed minds,

Kids are mirrors, reflecting back everything that happens to them. You’ve got to make sure they’re surrounded by good things.

I read up on things because knowledge is a weapon. You can use it to keep yourself safe.

Every fairy tale tells you: knowing someone’s true name gives you power over them. No one ever talks about how it might go the other way around. It might give something a hold over you.

The truth doesn’t always set you free.

Are these memories real? The mind is a liar.

Everyone has one story that explains them completely.

“But I think even you know that in the end, it eats them alive. Everything they are.” Mia doesn’t argue. “That’s what fear does,” she says, weary.

I lash out at and punish those I fear for. Those I love. Maybe we all do.

Everyone and their insatiable desire to help.

Children change things.

But I thought normal was armor.

Everyone has one story that explains them completely. I thought I knew what mine was. I was wrong—I am in it, here and now. This will be the choice that defines me.

sometimes the right choice was the hard one.

Everything comes around the dial in the end.

The decision tree always brings you to the right place, even if it’s one you don’t want to go.

It occurs to me that love is as bad as pain sometimes, which is a very interesting thought

But what is writing for, if not to shine a light on who we are and what we’re capable of? Even if, as a species, we human beings don’t always come across well in the telling.