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She loved the simplicity of the lie, the purity of it, when the truth had become such an ugly thing.
She always acted like an emotion expressed was the most dangerous thing in the world.
Motherhood was a physical act as much as an emotional one. It took every part of you.
The moment a woman was born determined so much of who she was allowed to become.
made a choice and then she had made another and another after that. Taken together, the small choices anyone made added up to a life.
One of life’s contradictions: how human beings were at once entirely resilient and impossibly fragile. One decision could stay with you forever, and yet you could live through almost anything.
They would eat their grief before it swallowed them.
To be seen as something other than herself in relation to the rest of them. That stayed with her. It was true. Moving to New York had saved her life. But sometimes it felt like a kind of exile. In her heart, she believed that she belonged here, among her family, in the only place she had ever thought of as home.
It wasn’t right that you could only understand your parents’ pain once you’d experienced the things they had, and by then, in her case anyway, they were gone.
