This is Where I Leave You

by Jonathan Tropper

you can legally get married before you can do a shot of tequila. We knew marriage could be difficult in the same way that we knew there were starving children in Africa. It was a tragic fact but worlds away from our reality.

“It’s okay to cry,” Mom says quietly. “I know.” “You can laugh too. There’s no correct emotional response.”

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

Childhood feels so permanent, like it’s the entire world, and then one day it’s over and you’re shoveling wet dirt onto your father’s coffin, stunned at the impermanence of everything.

there’s nothing sweeter than a two-year-old speaking, with his high-pitched sincerity and his immigrant English.

When does it all happen? In increments, so you can’t watch out for it, you can’t fix it. One day you just wake up and discover that you got old while you were sleeping.

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

“Tell me what you’re thinking.” It’s an absurd request. Our minds, unedited by guilt or shame, are selfish and unkind, and the majority of our thoughts, at any given time, are not for public consumption, because they would either be hurtful or else just make us look like the selfish and unkind bastards we are. We don’t share our thoughts, we share carefully sanitized, watered-down versions of them, Hollywood adaptations of those thoughts dumbed down for the PG-13 crowd.

You never know when it will be the last time you’ll see your father, or kiss your wife, or play with your little brother, but there’s always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you’d never stop grieving.

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

Sometimes, contentment is a matter of will. You have to look at what you have right in front of you, at what it could be, and stop measuring it against what you’ve lost. I know this to be wise and true, just as I know that pretty much no one can do it.

Get comfortable with being alone. It will empower you.”

Sometimes people say ‘I want to apologize,’ and then that’s supposed to be their apology, when in fact, by saying they want to apologize, they manage to avoid the actual apology.”

at some point it doesn’t matter who was right and who was wrong. At some point, being angry is just another bad habit, like smoking, and you keep poisoning yourself without thinking about it.”