Carrie Soto Is Back

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

People who are actually playing the game lose. We all lose. We lose all the time. That is life. So we are not the same, Soto. I have courage. You’re just good at tennis.”

Maybe it’s a lie that you have to keep doing what you have always done. That you have to be able to draw a straight line from how you acted yesterday to how you’ll act tomorrow. You don’t have to be consistent. You can change, I think. Just because you want to.

“You want to know the secret? It’s the same thing we are all doing about life every single day.” I look to her. “Forget there’s an ending.”

Grief is like a deep, dark hole. It calls like a siren: Come to me, lose yourself here. And you fight it and you fight it and you fight it, but when you finally do succumb and jump down into it, you can’t quite believe how deep it is. It feels as if this is how you will live for the rest of your life, falling. Terrified and devastated, until you yourself die. But that is the mirage. That is grief’s dizzying spell. The fall isn’t never-ending. It does have a ground floor.