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A wasted life was a tragedy however you looked at it,
Maybe in gloomier states people were too cold and depressed to act upon their violent obsessions and fantasies.
His words were an example of how narcissists, with their lack of empathy, didn’t think others were impacted by life in the same way.
when your walls were up, surprises hit harder.
“I’ll be fine.” She wouldn’t. But closure for everyone was more important than her mental health.
It was harder for beautiful people like him to get old because they had so much further to fall and so many adjustments to make, going from a world where things came easy because you were so damn dazzling, to a world where you had to fight to prove you were even average.
You kept thinking you’d made it, but in reality the place you wanted was always out of reach.
False memories could also be scars that protected a person when reality was too painful.
Fathers were important, but sometimes Daniel thought a strong female influence and role model—mother, aunt, grandmother—could be more important in childhood development.
He straightened, fully worried now. “Who?”
She needed him and he was sitting there staring at the television, remote in his hand, going through the menu on the screen. While her pain filled the room and she fell apart only feet away from him. His indifference cut to the bone.
First the monsters come, then the indifference.
she was here, needing someone to understand what she was going through, lying on the couch, shattering, while her husband, her life partner, sat a few feet away, deliberately, yes, deliberately, oblivious to her pain.
Maybe when she grew old and dementia took over her brain. But even then, the old memories were the last to fade.
“I’ve been working on keeping my paranoia tamped down, channeling calm, taking people at face value, or just plain avoiding them. Trying not to look or dig beyond the skin. Focus more on facts. Facts give us what we need without the color and confusion.”
Logic should never be ignored, and gut instinct can turn on a person.
She found that a comfort in a sea of things that felt too bleak to shine a light on.
Abuse came wrapped in different packages, and indifference to a partner’s pain was one of them.
He might not have realized it, but blame was once again being put on her.
Self-doubt was the thing she found the most cruel and pervasive.
There was no starting over for most people. That was a misconception. Unless a person’s memory could be erased, there were no fresh starts, only progression. Even if you burned down a house where bad things had happened, the house would still be there in your mind, regardless.
None of it reached her in a deep way. It was all just behavior.
She had no heart. And oddly enough, Reni found it reassuring to finally be able to acknowledge that.
An idea, a notion, love, hate, formed in childhood, was hard to redirect because it was so ingrained and so accepted as normal.
Motherhood held a promise of a fulfilled life, that promise dangling out there as the blessed event that would make a person whole, complete. But in reality, it was hole not whole. Like punch a hole right through you until everything leaked out.
A baby crawled out of you and suddenly you were supposed to be a saint. Mothers couldn’t cuss or get drunk or have sex. Mothers couldn’t be creative or outrageous or attractive.
Her husband never asked too many questions, which meant she’d never had to tell too many lies.
But bravery was a funny thing. It could fluctuate and vanish if you looked away too long.
Bad things were still happening in the world, and bad things had happened to both of them, but nature brought solace.
Like him, she’d been a shadow, a foot soldier, moving through the wake of someone else’s life.
But in her case, she was trying to find and correct and atone for the sins of others, while also attempting to define and untether herself from those very people.
“I cope by looking up and out. That’s where I find help. Nature never lets me down.”
Curiosity and the ability to be amazed were essential for them both right now. When those responses slipped away, a person was in trouble. Awe was part of the human experience that couldn’t and shouldn’t be discounted.
