You Could Make This Place Beautiful

by Maggie Smith

The flat gray, the deadening, was worth it—for my kids, for my marriage, for me—and eventually it gave way to shades of gray. There were almost whites, almost blacks.

This book is my torma, my offering. Please take it. Taste its sweetness.

I’m dog-earing a realization in my mind now: I don’t think fathers are asking themselves these questions.

Fathers don’t feel guilty for wanting an identity apart from their children, because the expectation is that they have lives outside of the home. I’m starring and underlining this fact for future reference.

if I want to remember the contours and textures of my daily life from a certain time, the easiest way back is to look at my social media.

None of this was good news, except it was incredible news, because vasculitis wasn’t the worst-case scenario film I had playing in my head when I saw the bruises but hadn’t yet seen his lab results. It wasn’t leukemia. My boy would be okay.

That life was a boat. I could almost hear the water slapping at the sides of it. I felt the floor moving beneath me as if rising and falling on waves.

Discards feels more like delivers when you’re standing on the beach, all those broken pieces left at your feet: shards of abalone, tiger-striped spines of conch, gray wedges of sand dollar, none from the same whole.

There were so few things intact—a few spirals, a handful of bead-small snail shells, and the copper-peach coins, pearlescent and penny-sized. They glinted up at us from the sand. I slipped them, still gritty, into my pockets. We kept what we wanted, and what we didn’t, the tide hauled away.

Sand is hard enough to walk in, all resistance. It pulls you down, swallows you up to your ankles.

I remember the wind and so many stars, unmoved by the wind.

chose then to smile at him, to use my bright voice—because my antidepressants were working, and the sky was delft and cloudless, and our son’s hair was a nest of yellow straw from a week at the sea.

For months, maybe even years, I folded and folded my happiness until I couldn’t fold it anymore, until it fit under my tongue, and I held it there.

She looks like someone who is used to the sea and is now on dry land.

When my marriage ended, it got loud in my head, as loud and crowded as an obnoxious party where no one is having a good time. I wanted out of there. I couldn’t leave—there are no Irish exits from one’s own head—but maybe I could make staying more livable.

Even in daylight the half moon was visible, a little sticker half peeled off.

The universe is still expanding, but it happens so slowly we don’t feel it or see it. The universe slipped the gate and kept running. It keeps running.

I am not alone. Whatever else there was or is, writing is with me.

There isn’t a singular, golden, impossibly definitive metaphor that encapsulates everything. No, it’s all of them. I’m handing you a stack of Polaroids to shuffle in your hands, so some of the work is yours.

I loosened my white-knuckled grip on my life and instead of feeling panicked, I found myself being more playful, more spontaneous, less tethered to order for order’s sake.