This is Where I Leave You

by Jonathan Tropper

I want to shout at her. But I won’t because she’ll cry, and if she does, I probably will, and then she’ll have found a way in, and I will not let her pierce my walls in a Trojan horse of sympathy.

At some point you lose sight of your actual parents; you just see a basketful of history and unresolved issues.

“It would be a terrible mistake to go through life thinking that people are the sum total of what you see.”

Even under the best of circumstances, there’s just something so damn tragic about growing up.

That’s the thing about life; everything feels so permanent, but you can disappear in an instant.

honey, I would travel to the ends of the earth, kill or die, just to find one single thing that I could understand.

“A problem is something to solve,” Phillip says. “If there’s no solution, it’s not a problem, so stop treating it like one.”

Sometimes it’s heartbreaking to see your siblings as the people they’ve become. Maybe that’s why we all stay away from each other as a matter of course.