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She truly believed that she carried her own fate in the palm of her hand, as if destiny was nothing more than a green marble or a robin’s egg, a trinket any silly girl could scoop up and keep. She believed that all you wanted, you would eventually receive, and that fate was a force which worked with, not against you.
This is not the sort of thing that usually affects Gwen; she has a talent for blocking out bad news. All she has to do is shut her eyes and count to a hundred, but she’s not closing her eyes now. Oh, how she wishes she had stayed at home. How easy it would have been to go on thinking about nothing, to ignore death and fate and the possibility that a life can easily be shaken to its core. That is how you know you’ve left childhood behind—when you wish for time to go backward. But it’s too late for that. Whether Gwen likes it or not, she’s here, under this gray and mournful sky, and her eyes are
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This small creature is not at all confused about what it wants, unlike men and women, who have the ability to conceal their deepest desires. Men and women, after all, can hide their love away. Men don’t chase after cars. Women don’t throw themselves upon cement doorsteps, curled up in a heap, until somebody opens the door and finally lets them inside.
Among men and women, those in love do not always announce themselves, with declarations and vows. But they are the ones who weep when you’re gone. Who miss you every single night, especially when the sky is so deep and beautiful, and the ground so very cold.
He loved her for thirty-five years, which for some people is as good as a lifetime.
If you’re disconnected from someone for a long enough time, does blood still commit you to one another? Does history, or fate?
It is sometimes possible to look at a person and see inside, although this happens so rarely it’s always a shock, like a form of electricity traveling from one soul to another. It can only be glimpsed for an instant, but in that instant you can see the core of a person, even in the middle of a crowded barroom, as he comes up beside you, while the jukebox is playing a country-western song you’ve never heard before and will never forget.
You build your world around someone, and then what happens when he disappears? Where do you go—into pieces, into atoms, into the arms of another man? You go shopping, you cook dinner, you work odd hours, you make love to someone else on June nights. But you’re not really there, you’re someplace else where there is blue sky and a road you don’t recognize. If you squint your eyes, you think you see him, in the shadows, beyond the trees. You always imagine that you see him, but he’s never there. It’s only his spirit, that’s what’s there beneath the bed when you kiss your husband, there when you
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At twenty you’re convinced you know everything, but forty is even worse; that’s when you’ve realized no one can know everything, and yet when it comes to certain situations, you still believe yourself to be an absolute expert. When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure. That’s what you learn at sixty, and, as it turns out, no one is ever surprised by this bit of news.
It’s not the lie that’s the problem: it’s the distance the lie forges between you.
Do what you want, do what you will, do what you have to, do what you think you cannot.
Here is the most difficult aspect of forgiveness: You have to ask in order to receive it.
But what do they know about love? You make bargains you’d never imagine you’d agreed to, and you do it over and over again.
