His & Hers

by Alice Feeney

There is a difference between being and feeling alone, and it is possible to miss someone and be with them at the same time.

We rarely deserve the lives we lead. We pay for them however we can, be it with money, guilt, or regret.

Sometimes I think I am the unreliable narrator of my own life. Sometimes I think we all are.

Sometimes our memories reframe themselves to reveal prettier pictures of our past, something a little less awful to look back at. Sometimes we need to paint over them, to pretend not to remember what is hidden underneath.

Clothes don’t make the woman, but they can help disguise the cloth we are cut from.

I’ve always loved listening to the way different people speak—it can tell you so much about them. I don’t just mean accents, I mean everything: the tone, the volume, the speed, as well as the language. The words they choose to use, and how and when and why they say them. The silences between the sentences, which can be just as loud. A person’s voice is like a wave—some just wash right over you, while others have the power to knock you down and drag you into an ocean of self-doubt.

Home is not always where the heart is. For people like me, home is where the hurt lives that made us into who we are.

You are more than the worst thing you’ve ever done.

Memories are shapeshifters. Some bend, some twist, and some shrivel and die over time. But our worst ones never leave us.

There are things children choose not to see in their parents; sometimes it is best to walk past a mirror without stopping to look at your reflection.

You can’t help someone find their way if they won’t admit they’re lost.

Sometimes we hold on too tight to the wrong people, until it hurts so much we have to let go.

People rarely see themselves the way others do; we all carry broken mirrors.

We all carry prisons of regret inside our heads, unable to break free of the guilt and pain they cause us.

We all try to buy a little more time, but it’s priceless. We get what we’re given, not what we can afford. Time is a trapdoor we all tumble down at some point in our lives, often completely unaware of how far we have fallen.

We all hide behind the version of ourselves we let the rest of the world see.

It might be true that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but sometimes the apple can roll down a hill, far, far away from where it landed.

Lives are like light bulbs; they’re not as hard to change as people think.

People tend to see what they want in the people they love. They reshape them inside their heads, twisting them into the people they wish they were, instead of the people they are.

Nobody cares who you used to be; it’s only who you are now that counts.

Parents spend their youth trying to understand their children; children spend their adulthood trying to understand their parents.