You Could Make This Place Beautiful

by Maggie Smith

I am out with lanterns, looking for myself. —Emily Dickinson

The truth isn’t easy, but it’s simple.

My husband and I became friends in an advanced creative writing workshop in college.

It’s too bad the walk through the pines has to happen before the play begins,

This is like the 3rd analogy of the same spiel

We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves—all of our selves—wherever we go.

It’s a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.

My life is hard, and there is no pill to make a hard life easy.

If you hurt my feelings, I might have carried that pain quietly, but the quiet was loud.

Everything we learn, we learn from someone who is imperfect.

Thank you for the pain you caused me, because that pain woke me up. It hurt enough to make me change.

“Wish for more pain,” a friend’s therapist once told her, “because that’s how you’ll change.” It has to hurt so much that you have to do something differently. The pain forces your hand.

Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.

In stories there are good guys and bad guys. In life there are people in pain, people who are broken and making decisions from a place of brokenness, people living with wounds we can’t see—and these people, these fallible human beings, are our mothers and fathers, our husbands and wives, our sisters and brothers, our children, our teachers.

Maybe this is a story of two human beings who committed to each other very young and didn’t survive one another’s changes.

Do not be stilled by anger or grief. Burn them both and use that fuel to keep moving. Look up at the clouds and tip your head way back so the roofs of the houses disappear. Keep moving.

at least she has her children, or it was worth it for the children.

I waas not thinking this

Our happy place, Bittersweet.

For years I’d joked that my body was basically a plant stand for my head. I lived from the neck up, but obviously I knew I needed the rest of it to get me around, to keep me going. I fed and watered myself now and then.

What I’m living and experiencing is my life, but what about the rest? If I know so little about the life I’ve called my own, if there are blank spaces I can’t fill in, can I still call it my life? Can I still claim it as mine?

Under all comedy is tragedy.

“I am who I am, doing what I came to do.”

Where am I? What does it matter, really? I’m in the in-between—not where I was, not where I’m going.

I kept waiting to wake up, but I was awake.

The thing is, flowers die when you pick them. As soon as you cut them and put them in a vase, the clock’s on. You’re displaying them as something beautiful, and the whole time they’re decomposing.

Even the neighborhood trees are distanced. I can’t not notice them now, the intervals at which they were planted: at least six feet between them and between the nests squirrels built in their uppermost branches.

“But the guy who’s all left-leaning, even calls himself a feminist, but then he expects you to handle everything at home and doesn’t want to work around your career at all—that’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing,”

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

The nost in nostalgia means “homecoming”; the algia means “pain.” Hundreds of years ago, nostalgia was a diagnosable medical condition. Johannes Hofer, a seventeenth-century Swiss physician, named the condition, which he identified in homesick soldiers. Symptoms of nostalgia among Swiss soldiers included melancholy, malnutrition, sleepiness, brain fever, and hallucinations.

Am I feeling or simply describing feelings? Am I in my body or somehow out of it,

The thing about birds: If we knew nothing of jays or wrens or sparrows, we’d believe the trees were singing, as if each tree has its own song.

The thing about this life: If we knew nothing of what was missing, what has been removed, it would look full and beautiful.

The tiny mouse howls like a wolf.

I did not it know this animal existed. The cutest sound next to the rain frog.

I wanted this book to have more levity. More than that, I wanted the life to have more levity. Reader, I wish I could offer you 20 percent more wit and 20 percent less pain, and I wish life had offered me those bonuses and discounts, too. But to play devil’s advocate: It’s okay to have feelings. You don’t have to laugh them off. You don’t have to turn everything painful that happens into a self-deprecating joke in which you and your suffering are the punchline. It’s okay to put away the sad trombone. It’s okay to show up as your whole self, to come as you are.