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I was scared like a dog is scared of the spot where a walnut once fell on his head. Irrationally, viscerally, in a way tied more to memory than possibility.
Lest any twenty-first-century mother find a moment not devoted to proving maternal devotion through crafts.
the best way to survive my mother’s depression was to go numb, to match her silence and her disregard for cleanliness, for answering the phone, for making meals.
The dosage of my antidepressant is such that I haven’t cried actual tears in a decade, but there are times when I want so badly to cry that I make all the noises of crying, press my fists into my eyes so I feel something similar.
The absence of tears hurts more—or makes whatever hurts hurt more—than if I could just sob. In
my heart cracked along familiar fault lines.
this middle phase, these deaths of people in their early forties, felt the cruelest. Maybe because there were always kids involved, ones far too young to leave behind.
Her smallness had seemed such currency to me at Granby, when I believed the smaller you could be, as a girl, the more the world revolved around you.
“It feels wrong to give her all this happiness and confidence when we know what’s coming.
had to accept that people fundamentally slide past each other in this world.
I was still, despite everything, my teenage self. I had grown over her like rings around the core of a tree, but she was still there.
It was a worthy distraction. I’ve always been happiest when I can sit in the dark, when I can turn off my own life and watch a story unfold.
Everything green is something that’s survived.
