Before I Let Go (Skyland, #1)

by Kennedy Ryan

finding someone you can laugh with when everything hurts—was the stuff happily ever afters were made of.

That’s the part of depression people don’t consider, that at times it physically hurts.

She’s as beautiful as the day we first met. She’s changing, aging, but to me, only getting better. Like God looked at the feline flare of her cheekbones

and the tempting pout of her mouth, the sultry dark eyes flecked with gold and said, You think she looks good now? I’m just getting started.

How do you breathe when the person you thought you’d cherish forever looks at you the way Yasmen looks at me right now because you’ve hurt them so much?

Grief is a grind. It is the work of breathing and waking and rising and moving through a world that feels emptier. A gaping hole has been torn into your existence, and everyone around you just walks right past it like it’s not even there.

And I think I’m most grateful for time, which doesn’t always heal all wounds, but teaches us how to be happy again even with our scars.”

“If I waited until I don’t have feelings for Yasmen before I moved on,” I tell Vashti as gently as I can, “I never would.”

“I was no walk in the park, Merry.” “Who wants to walk in the park? I think that man would run wild with you.”

“Depression,” she goes on, “is a liar. If it will tell you no one loves you, that you’re not good enough, that you’re a burden or, in the most extreme cases, better off dead, then it can certainly convince you that you’re better off without the man you love, and that, ultimately, he’s better off without you.”

Our traumas, the things that injure us in this life, even over time, are not always behind us. Sometimes they linger in the smell of a newborn baby. They surprise us in the taste of a home-cooked meal. They wait in the room at the end of the hall. They are with us. They are present. And there are some days when memories feel more real than those who remain, than the joys of this world.