More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
No lie ever reaches old age. —Sophocles
What does it say about us when we begin to accept someone else’s sacrifice? When we begin to forget. Is it natural, the way things should be, all ordained and right in the flow of life? Or is it a betrayal to their memory? An injustice.
were
In the family unit things like morality and justice and right didn’t always hold sway. Sometimes a tarnished sense of love reversed things in a weird mirror image of what should be. Normal became split lips and bruises and inappropriate touching.
We all think we have choices, and we do, but we’re flotsam too. At the whim of circumstance, the things inside us, something as irritating as chance.
We become passengers sometimes. We like to think we’re in control and the electrically charged tissue in our heads is the captain steering the ship. But sometimes an iceberg comes out of the fog, and evasive measures are taken. We’re suddenly the people holding on for dear life, hoping whoever’s driving knows what the fuck they’re doing.
Because humans are learning machines. We learn by what’s done to us, not just what we’re taught. We learn to injure and touch and wound what we shouldn’t. We learn to abuse and abandon if we’re hurt and lost. The past imprints on the future like a typewriter slowly running out of ink.
Tragedy was a consumable commodity, and everyone was buying.
There comes a time in everyone’s life where they begin wondering what the point is. If they’re making a difference or just treading water. What was the point of work if it only funded a week’s vacation in some paradise where you could only ever be a visitor, never a resident? What good was it to hate waking up on Monday morning only to yearn for Friday night? If purpose became a perk not a prerequisite, what the hell were we even doing?
Grief shows up in waves. It’s strange how it’s gone for a little while, then comes raging back when you don’t expect it.
“Nice to know people will give you their time,” he mused, watching out the window. “The only thing we really have to give, and it’s special. Time’s just another word for love.” “You’re drunk.” I nudged his knee with my foot, and he grinned.
We’re told a life without pain is ideal. To avoid suffering as much as possible. But pain is where you grow. We cry with our first breaths because it hurts to expel amniotic fluid and take in air. No transition occurs without pain. It’s why liminal spaces are uniform and ambiguous—to lull before the change. Before the pain.
No one got to say how another grieved. There was no right or wrong way. There was only the valley of loss and how you made your way out of it. Some never did.
The subconscious is a serious person with a clipboard and a list. It observes and checks boxes, scribbles little notes in the margins of our thoughts. It watches and catalogs and hopes the person in which it resides can’t possibly be as dense as they seem. And yet it is unsurprised as we stumble through mistake after mistake, oblivious to its cues.
Everyone has something to fight for. But not everyone has someone to fight for them.
There are no words for what we do to each other. No words for what we are. Human beings are the strongest and weakest part of the world. And when they break, they shatter everything around them.
